Engineering Manager - Conversations

• 8+ years in software engineering, with at least 2–3 years managing teams of 8+ engineers.

• Hands-on technical depth — you can still review architecture, debug a production incident, and call out a bad design choice in a PR.

• Excellent product judgment — proven track record of shipping products customers love, not just features that hit deadlines.

• Experience leading teams that own a major product surface with high traffic, real-time requirements, and complex state.

• Strong grasp of distributed systems and/or frontend systems at scale — ideally both.


Demonstrated ability to run ops cleanly — daily, sprintly, and quarterly — while keeping eyes on the long-term vision.

• A team of 10+ engineers — juniors to seniors — building the Conversations product end to end: inbox UI, real-time threads, multi-channel routing, search, automations, and the platform underneath it all.

• A product surface used by millions of users daily, processing 68M+ messages/month and climbing to billions.

• Frontend, backend, and platform work across:

• Frontend: Vue.js (2/3), Vuex/Pinia, Module Federation, real-time UI at scale

• Backend: Node.js (TypeScript), Go, event-driven pipelines, 50+ workloads, thousands of pods

• Infra: GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks), Firestore, MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch, ClickHouse

• The roadmap, the architecture, and the people decisions that determine whether we win this category.

On the product side:

• Bring strong product judgment to every roadmap call — what to build, what to kill, what to polish.

• Partner with Product and Design as a true peer — push back, prototype, and ship things that customers actually feel.

• Obsess over the details: latency, layout stability, the way a thread loads on a flaky network, the way a notification lands at the right moment.

• Own the vision — quarterly bets, where the product needs to be in 12 months, what wedge we drive next.

On the engineering side:

• Be hands-on. Read PRs that matter. Get into the code when the stakes are high. Stay technical enough that your team trusts your calls.

• Own engineering velocity, quality, and stability — three numbers you live and die by.

• Architect for the next 10x: delivery guarantees, retry semantics, idempotency, real-time sync, omnichannel state.

• Run clean ops — daily standups that don't waste time, sprints that ship, quarters that compound.

On the people side:

• Build a high-performing team by putting the right people in the right seats.

• Regular 1:1s. Honest feedback. Real growth conversations. No surprises at performance review time.

• Hire smart. Coach harder. Move people up — or move them out — without flinching.

• Set a culture where engineers do their best work of their careers because of you, not in spite of you.

• The team is shipping fast and clean. Velocity is high, regressions are rare, and on-call is boring.

• Customers tell us, "I don't need Gmail anymore." Then they tell their friends.

• Your team is the one other teams want to join.

• You've earned the trust of engineers, PMs, designers, and leadership — because you deliver.

Customers > Org > Team > Self.

That's the order. In that order. Always.

• No blame games. Something broke? Fix it, learn from it, ship the post-mortem, move on.

• Customer-first thinking, not ego-first. The right answer wins — even if it wasn't yours.

• Strong opinions, weakly held. You'll change your mind when the data says so.

• You don't wait for permission to lead. You see the gap, you close it.

• We're not corporate. We're not politics. We don't do fluff.

• We don't do performance theater. We do performance.


We don't track hours. But when production breaks or a launch is on the line, we show up.

• Experience building inboxes, messaging, communication, or collaboration products.

• Familiarity with our stack: Vue.js, Node.js, Go, GCP, Kubernetes, Firestore, MongoDB, ClickHouse, ElasticSearch.

• You've shipped omnichannel or multi-channel systems (SMS, Email, WhatsApp, etc.) before.

• You've taken a 0→1 product to scale — or rebuilt one mid-flight without breaking it.

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