Engineering Manager, Distributed Computing Platform

About the role

Build and lead the team responsible for workload orchestration — the infrastructure that lets nTop customers define, launch, monitor, and collect results from large-scale distributed computation jobs. This team will be small by design: senior engineers, AI-native workflows, high individual leverage. We'll grow when the work earns it.

Responsibilities

• Build the team. Recruit, hire, and develop a small, senior engineering team.
• Define the technical approach. Own the architecture for headless execution and workload orchestration within the product direction set by the CTO and PM.
• Lead execution on integrations with HEEDS, ModelCenter, PhysicsX Flux, and cloud-native job services.
• Deliver the headless pipeline: job definition, submission, monitoring, failure handling, and results collection.
• Partner with Product. Work with the Product Manager to translate product strategy into engineering plans. Provide grounded technical input on feasibility, sequencing, and risk. Push back when plans don't account for real constraints; propose alternatives when they don't.
• Engage directly with customer engineering and IT teams to design systems that work within real constraints — not around them.

Required

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineering teams; experience building and shipping distributed systems or infrastructure software
• Hands-on expertise with Docker, Kubernetes, and at least one cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure); deep understanding of job scheduling and compute-intensive workloads at scale
• Experience shipping into customer-managed environments — on-prem, hybrid, or air-gapped
• Track record of building teams: recruiting, developing, and making hard performance calls
• Strong collaboration skills with PMs, designers, and field engineers; able to reason about customer value, not just technical elegance

PREFERRED

• HPC, scientific computing, or engineering simulation background (Slurm, PBS, HEEDS, ModelCenter, OpenMDAO)
• Experience building for customers with ITAR/EAR obligations or strict IT governance
• Familiarity with consumption-based pricing transitions
• Comfort reading and reasoning about C++ codebases