Senior Manager, Software Engineering (Authentication)

Pindrop is the Real Human + Right Human® Identity Trust Platform for the AI era. As AI-driven fraud and deepfakes erode trust in digital communication, Pindrop delivers continuous identity verification and deepfake detection across voice, video, and digital interactions in real time. Enterprises rely on Pindrop to secure billions of high-risk customer interactions each year, including top U.S. banks, as well as leading insurers and healthcare providers. Powered by models trained on more than 1.5 billion real-world interactions annually and protected by 300+ patents, Pindrop restores trust while reducing fraud, lowering operational costs, and improving customer experience.

About the role

As Senior Manager, Software Engineering for Authentication, you will lead a critical part of Pindrop’s Passport platform. You will own the technical and people leadership for the teams building and operating the high-performance cloud services behind real-time voice authentication and identity verification. This role is centered on operational excellence, system stability, and strong engineering leadership in a high-stakes environment with strict latency and reliability expectations.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop engineering managers, senior engineers, and emerging technical leaders across the Authentication area, building strong ownership, healthy operating rhythms, and clear growth paths.
• Translate product and engineering strategy into a clear technical roadmap, execution plan, and operating model for Authentication.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, and operational health of cloud-native, API-based distributed systems that power customer-facing authentication journeys.
• Drive predictable, high-quality delivery across multiple concurrent initiatives by improving prioritization, planning, cross-team coordination, and execution discipline.
• Raise the bar on architecture, observability, testing, incident response, postmortems, and engineering standards across Authentication services.
• Partner closely with Product, Research, Security, Platform, and adjacent engineering teams to align roadmap priorities, technical investments, and customer outcomes.
• Own metrics that improve delivery health, system performance, team effectiveness, and on-call sustainability.
• Act as a senior technical escalation point during complex customer issues and production incidents, and drive durable follow-through after incidents occur.
• Guide how Authentication safely consumes and operationalizes AI/ML-backed trust signals, model outputs, and automation in production systems.
• Foster a culture of accountability, inclusion, learning, and calm execution under pressure.

Requirements

• 8–12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience building and operating distributed backend systems and APIs in production.
• 3–5+ years of engineering leadership experience, including experience leading through managers and/or senior technical leads.
• Strong technical depth in cloud-native architecture, microservices, observability, CI/CD, and modern engineering practices across AWS and/or GCP.
• Proven experience improving reliability, execution, and engineering standards for customer-facing, high-availability systems.
• Hands-on background in backend technologies such as Go and/or Python, plus strong understanding of data stores and service design for low-latency systems.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills, including experience working with Product, Security, Support, Customer Success, and other engineering teams.

Qualifications

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience in authentication, identity, fraud prevention, risk engines, or other security-sensitive product domains.
• Familiarity with modern IAM concepts and standards such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, RBAC/ABAC, or related policy-driven access patterns.
• Experience partnering with Research, MLOps, or data teams to productionize model outputs, risk signals, or other AI/ML-enabled capabilities.
• Experience leading teams operating multi-cloud services with meaningful on-call responsibility and incident load.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package, including RSUs (Restricted Stock Units) for all employees.
• Remote-first environment with flexibility and autonomy.
• Regular team on-sites, company-wide events, and intentional gatherings.
• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO).
• Generous health and welfare plans, including one employer-paid “employee-only” plan.
• Best-in-class Health Savings Account (HSA) employer contribution.
• Low-cost vision and dental plans for you and your family.
• Paid Parental Leave for birth, adoptive, and foster parents.
• One year of diaper delivery for new parents.
• Recurring monthly phone and internet allowance.
• Enhanced fertility and GLP-1 benefits.
• Annual Learning & Development stipend.

Pay

US Base Pay Range: $195,000 USD - $235,000 USD. This position is eligible for additional compensation in the form of an annual discretionary bonus.