Engineering Manager

About the role

Confido is the AI infrastructure powering modern CPG — the platform that 200+ brands like OLIPOP, Simple Mills, Dr. Squatch, and Tropicana use to run everything from deductions to production planning. Finance, accounting, sales, and operations, unified in one system for the first time. We're growing 5x year over year with a small team in New York City; the people who join now will shape the product, the culture, and the company itself.

As our first Engineering Manager, you'll take direct ownership of a team of engineers and, alongside the CTO, define what engineering leadership looks like at Confido: how we grow careers, how we hire, and how we stay fast as the team doubles. This is a player-coach role on a team that has never had a management layer. Our engineers are strong, opinionated, and allergic to process for its own sake — you'll earn their trust through technical credibility and by making their work visibly better, not through org charts.

Location: New York, NY (Relocation supported)

Responsibilities

• Directly managing a team of 6–10 engineers — 1:1s, coaching, career growth, and performance
• Owning delivery for your team's roadmap: planning, prioritization, and unblocking without adding heavyweight process
• Partnering with the CTO on org design, career ladders, and management practices as we scale from 20 to 50+ engineers
• Staying close to the code — joining architecture and design reviews across our Rails, TypeScript/React, and Python systems
• Building and running hiring loops that raise the bar, and closing great engineers in a competitive market
• Identifying and growing future leads and managers from within the team

Example Problems

• Introducing structure to a team of 20+ engineers who have only ever reported to the CTO — without slowing them down
• Designing a career ladder that senior ICs respect and that doesn't push everyone toward management
• Keeping delivery predictable while the team, the product surface area, and the customer base all double
• Turning skeptics into advocates: proving that good management is a force multiplier, not overhead

Requirements

• 3+ years managing software engineers directly, on top of 5+ years as a hands-on engineer
• You've scaled through hyper-growth at an early-stage startup — joining around Series A/B and riding it through Series C/D or beyond — and you know what breaks at each stage
• Enough technical depth to go deep in design reviews and hold your own with strong senior engineers (you don't need to ship production code daily)
• A track record of managing skeptics — you win people over through competence and outcomes, not title
• Bias toward lightweight process: you add structure only where it demonstrably helps, and you kill it when it doesn't

Nice to Have

• You've been a team's first manager, or introduced management to a previously flat org
• Experience as a founder, founding engineer, or early employee (first ~15)
• You've grown ICs into managers and built a leadership bench
• Familiarity with Ruby on Rails, TypeScript/React, or Python/ML systems
• Experience in B2B SaaS, fintech, or data-heavy products

Benefits

• Equity — own a meaningful piece of the company you’re helping build
• Fully paid health coverage through Aetna — we cover 100% of employee premiums
• Top-tier dental and vision coverage through Guardian
• Carrot Fertility Pro — comprehensive fertility and family-forming support
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Unlimited PTO — plus regular 4-day holiday weekends we actually take
• 401(k) through Vestwell
• Paid relocation support — we’ll help you make the move to NYC
• Fully equipped workspace from day one — laptop, monitor, keyboard, and a $200 stipend to personalize your setup
• Team perks — catered Friday lunches, team dinners, and unlimited coffee + snacks featuring products from the brands we work with

Pay

Compensation Range: $260K - $320K