Engineering Manager (Backend/Infra)

This is not a role for a career manager. And it’s not a role for someone who hasn’t had hire/fire responsibility yet either. The ideal candidate is a TLM/EM who is still a highly technical (“hands on” backend, infrastructure, platform, or AI systems) and are ready for a significant increase in scope.

Early on, you should expect to architect and build core systems, write production code, review implementation details, debug production issues, and ship 0-to-1 product capabilities alongside the team. The technical surface area includes data ingestion, representation systems, retrieval, agentic workflows, evaluation, backend infrastructure, and product architecture.

Over time, your leverage will increasingly come from hiring, developing engineers, setting technical direction, and helping the engineering organization scale.

The company has assembled an exceptional early team (9 Engineers) and has reached a point where the right technical leader can help shape both the product platform and the engineering organization.

What You’ll Own

• Architecting and building core product and infrastructure foundations
• Shipping 0-to-1 product capabilities alongside the team
• Building data ingestion, retrieval, evaluation, and agentic workflow systems over complex real-world technical data
• Technical direction and architectural decision-making
• Engineering execution and delivery
• Hiring, mentoring, and developing exceptional engineers
• Lightweight engineering processes that improve execution without slowing the team down
• Building systems and teams that scale together

You’ll work closely with the founders on both technical and organizational questions, helping shape how the company evolves over the coming years.

You likely have experience:

• Building backend, infrastructure, platform, distributed, or AI systems
• Shipping 0-to-1 products or major product capabilities in startup, applied AI lab, or high-growth environments
• Building production systems involving retrieval, evaluation, agents, data pipelines, or complex technical data
• Leading small, highly technical engineering teams
• Hiring and developing strong engineers
• Operating in fast-moving and unstructured environments
• Maintaining high standards for engineering quality

Experience with modern AI products, agentic workflows, search and ranking, retrieval systems, multimodal data, computer vision, LLM applications, or scientific/engineering data systems is especially relevant.

Prior startup experience is a strong plus.

We’re less interested in titles than we are in technical credibility, slope, judgment, ownership, and the ability to lead exceptional engineers.

Our ideal candidate is still a builder at heart. They care deeply about engineering quality, enjoy working with exceptional engineers, and are excited by the opportunity to help shape a company during its formative years.

Note on Work Culture: Most of the employees are in the office until 8pm on weekdays, and the entire team is generally available online on the weekends as well.

Seed-stage company in San Francisco building vertical AI for physical science R&D.

They’re building an AI-native system that helps scientists and engineers make faster, better decisions by unifying fragmented technical data and powering workflow-specific agents.

The company has strong design partners, access to unique datasets, and a highly technical early team working in person 5 days/week., Greylock is an early-stage investor in hundreds of remarkable companies including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Workday, Cloudera, Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Coinbase, Palo Alto Networks, among others. More can be found about us here: https://greylock.com