Engineering Manager

📋 Description

• • Fiducial, a rapidly expanding deep-tech startup at the forefront of autonomy, perception, and defense, is seeking a dynamic and experienced Engineering Manager to lead and cultivate its multidisciplinary engineering team. This pivotal role is designed for an individual who can bridge strong technical acumen with exceptional people leadership and organizational design, ensuring our engineering foundations are robust, scalable, and perfectly aligned with our ambitious growth trajectory.
• • In this capacity, you will be instrumental in professionalizing and scaling our existing engineering operations. The focus is not on a complete overhaul, but on enhancing and expanding the structures, processes, and practices that enable sustainable, predictable delivery at scale. You will be a key partner to the CTO and COO, working to transform engineering into a cohesive, high-performing system capable of navigating a critical scale-up phase.
• • Your primary responsibility will be the leadership and management of a diverse team comprising software, hardware, and embedded engineers. This includes providing mentorship to junior engineers and interns, fostering a collaborative and productive team environment, and ensuring clear ownership and accountability across all engineering functions.
• • You will play a crucial role in strengthening and evolving the engineering organization's structure. This involves defining clear roles, responsibilities, and reporting lines, as well as nurturing healthy team dynamics that promote innovation and efficiency. Effective capacity planning and project staffing will be paramount, ensuring that the engineering team's resources are strategically aligned with company priorities and delivery commitments.
• • A significant aspect of your mandate will be to enhance and refine engineering processes to support scalability. This extends across both the development lifecycle and field operations, ensuring that our methodologies can adapt and grow with the company. You will oversee strategic initiatives aimed at elevating hardware-software integration and optimizing system-level performance for our deployed solutions.
• • Collaboration is key in this role. You will work closely with Product and Operations teams, translating high-level product requirements into actionable engineering plans. This requires a deep understanding of both the technical landscape and the business objectives.
• • Partnering with DevOps and IT Infrastructure, you will introduce and adapt pragmatic Agile practices, CI/CD pipelines, and quality control measures that are appropriate for our growth stage. The goal is to enhance development velocity and product quality without introducing unnecessary complexity.
• • You will also serve as a critical escalation point for complex technical issues in deployed systems, working in tandem with relevant engineers and operations teams to ensure swift and effective resolution. This requires a blend of technical expertise and problem-solving skills.
• • In a capacity akin to a Chief of Staff for the CTO, you will contribute significantly to the planning and prioritization of engineering work. This involves balancing the demands of technical debt reduction, new feature development, and the critical needs of ongoing deployments.
• • You will conduct regular one-on-one meetings and performance discussions with team members, focusing on their professional growth, fostering a sense of ownership, and reinforcing accountability. A significant part of your role will involve contributing to the hiring, onboarding, and ongoing development of engineers as the team expands.
• • We expect you to build trust with individual contributors and empower them to function effectively as a cohesive team. You should be comfortable introducing structure where it's needed in an early-stage scale-up environment, always mindful of avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.
• • Clear and transparent communication across engineering, product, and operations is essential. You must value the realities of field operations and user feedback as highly as elegant designs and robust architectures. The ability to transition between strategic thinking and practical execution is vital, as is providing clear technical and organizational direction while remaining adaptable in a fast-paced setting.
• • Your technical background should encompass software systems, embedded systems, and/or hardware-software integration. Familiarity with Agile development, CI/CD, and modern engineering tooling is expected. Experience working within environments with regulatory, safety, or defense-related constraints is a significant advantage.
• • This role offers significant autonomy in managing day-to-day engineering execution and team operations, with the authority to propose and implement improvements to engineering practices and workflows. High-impact risks or trade-offs will be escalated to leadership for alignment when necessary.