Engineering Manager, Agent

What you'll do

• Own execution: Manage team prioritizes, drive alignment across stakeholders, adapt plans to maximize outcomes, and hold a high bar for delivery through active planning, prioritization, and follow-through
• Define team direction: Connect customer needs, product vision, and technical realities in close collaboration with Product, Design, and AI Research by setting clear priorities and making tradeoffs to deliver results
• Develop your team: Recruit, mentor, and grow engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and high performance. Create stretch opportunities for ICs, deliver clear and direct feedback, and manage underperformance early
• Drive operational excellence: Ensure execution is predictable, reliable, and sustainable, implementing best practices in project management and engineering processes
• Maintain the technical bar: Guide architectural decisions, ensure sound design tradeoffs, address tech debt that slows execution, and drive delivery of high-quality, reliable systems

What You Bring

Minimum Qualifications

Engineering Leadership Experience: 5+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years of engineering management experience delivering complex, cross-functional product work with high velocity and quality

Team Builder: Excels at hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent, and creating collaborative, empowering, and high-performing team environments

Technical Judgment: Strong technical background with the ability to guide architectural decisions, evaluate tradeoffs, and maintain engineering excellence without being hands-on day-to-day

Effective Communicator: Communicates clearly and effectively across technical and non-technical audiences, and thrives in collaborative environments working closely with Product, Design, and Research partners

Strategic Thinker: Plans ahead on a 12+ month horizon, but prioritizes and re-prioritizes aggressively as new information emerges. Makes and communicates calculated bets.

Adaptable and Resilient: Thrives in fast-paced, rapidly changing environments, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and drive results. AI moves very quickly and keeping pace with the market means you are already behind. High ownership and a bias toward action is a must.

Extra Credit!

• Experience building agents, developing evals, or leading teams building LLM-powered products
• Experience building creative tools in the past or you're a frequent user of creative media tools. If you join Descript, you'll end up making lots of videos!

Compensation: The base salary range for this role is $222,431-$261,684/year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, level, and may vary from the amount above.