Senior Engineering Manager, AI Product (Thunderbolt)

The opportunity

We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead engineering execution, people management, and operating practices for Thunderbolt as it moves from R&D incubation into a more mature product and enterprise development phase. This role will help the team define what production-ready means at this stage: stronger release discipline, clearer ownership, higher user-facing product quality, stronger engineering practices, and a more scalable operating model.

What you’ll do

• Lead engineering execution by clarifying priorities, ownership, timelines, risks, dependencies, and quality expectations.
• Manage engineers and contractors, including coaching, feedback, prioritization, performance support, and team development.
• Stay close to the codebase by contributing code, reviewing technical work, evaluating tradeoffs, and helping the team maintain momentum and quality.
• Partner with technical and product leadership to turn product direction, AI strategy, user experience goals, and technical priorities into coordinated engineering plans.
• Establish planning, review, release, and follow-through practices that improve predictability and reduce bottlenecks.
• Maintain high standards for code quality, testing, documentation, reliability, security awareness, maintainability, and release readiness.
• Build strong product and architectural context across AI-enabled workflows, integrations, local-first or customer-controlled architectures, and release requirements.
• Partner across product, design, enterprise-facing teams, and technical leadership to balance speed, user experience, privacy, quality, enterprise readiness, and long-term sustainability.
• Lead hiring, onboarding, and resource planning as the Thunderbolt engineering team grows.
• Help Thunderbolt scale from an incubation-stage product into a reliable, enterprise-ready open-source AI product.

What you bring

• 15+ years of professional software development experience, including significant experience in senior engineering leadership or complex product delivery roles.
• 5+ years of experience managing technical teams, including senior engineers or senior individual contributors.
• A track record of leading a team that shipped polished, top-tier products held to a genuine standard of craft.
• Strong ability to translate ambiguous product and technical direction into clear plans, ownership models, and delivery momentum.
• Technical fluency with AI-enabled products, including the ability to evaluate tradeoffs across areas such as LLM applications, RAG workflows, agents, enterprise search, automation, on-device AI, or AI evaluation.
• Demonstrated experience delivering complex applications across multiple platforms, such as desktop, web, and mobile, using technologies such as Tauri, Electron, React Native, or comparable frameworks.
• Experience with enterprise software, regulated environments, or similarly complex technical products, including security, privacy, compliance readiness, administration, integrations, and customer-controlled deployment models.
• Practical experience with local-first, offline-capable, self-hosted, hybrid, on-premise, air-gapped, or other customer-controlled product architectures, including tradeoffs related to data storage, sync, privacy, reliability, and user experience.
• Experience improving engineering practices related to technical planning, code review, release readiness, testing, documentation, CI/CD, maintainability, or technical debt management.
• Excellent communication skills around technical prioritization, release risk, ownership, quality expectations, and tradeoffs.

Bonus points for

• Experience working in open-source or maintainer-style engineering environments.
• Experience with compliance or security standards such as SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, or similar frameworks.
• Experience helping take a product from zero to one in a startup or new product initiative.