Engineering Manager

Job description

ABOUT REPLICANT Replicant is building the autonomous contact center: AI that answers every call, decides whether a specific AI or a person is best suited to resolve it, and manages the conversation end to end, getting better with every one. We start with voice, the channel people reach for first and the hardest to automate well, and we have run these agents in production for enterprises since 2020. The bots we deliver are the product, so engineering here sits unusually close to customer outcomes. Customer service is a nearly trillion-dollar problem that is barely one percent automated and moving fast: the category of the decade, and the question is who leads it. Winning means executing a company's procedures with near-perfect reliability while knowing exactly when to flex, which is why determinism and testability are how we earn trust in production, not relics. Meeting that bar on a complex, AI-heavy platform takes a team that can move quickly without losing rigor. We are lean by design. A small, senior team does the work of a group several times its size, and every engineer owns multiple initiatives. The engineering organization is about 50 people today and growing, and we hold a high bar as we scale. THE ROLE We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead one of our Product Engineering squads: a team of roughly 8 to 15 engineers that takes on a range of projects and products across our platform. You will report directly to the SVP of Engineering, and you will hold full budget and headcount-planning responsibility for your team. Your priorities, in order: your people, their growth, the process and norms your team works by, and the delivery that follows from all three. This is a servant-leadership role, not a boss-first one. You are not here to own a team; you are here to unlock one. Replicant has invested in every engineer you will lead, and your job is to help each of them do the best work of their career while making that investment pay off, for them and for the company. We expect our managers to be outstanding people managers first. You will carry enough technical competency to establish credibility with your engineers and to reason well about tradeoffs, priorities, and risk, while trusting your senior ICs to own the code. Shape a great process, fit the right people to it, then get out of the way so your team can move. THE MANAGEMENT TEAM YOU'RE JOINING This is the part we care about most, and the thing that makes the role different from most EM jobs. We are not hiring someone to run their own silo. We are hiring a peer for a tight engineering-management team that makes the decisions for the whole engineering department together. Concretely, that looks like: - A first-team principle: your first team is the other engineering managers, not only your squad. We solve the department's challenges together, and we back each other's teams, covering rituals, 1:1s, and on-call through transitions and leave. - We meet several times a week in short, high-intensity working sessions. Cameras on, fully engaged; this is explicitly not a status meeting or a manager vanity meeting. We bias hard toward decisions and action, and we keep a decision journal so calls stick. - We disagree and commit. High trust, high candor, direct feedback given early rather than left to fester. Once a decision is made, we all carry it. As a group we own the things that make engineering work here: the hiring bar and interview process; the career ladder, leveling, and competency framework; how the roadmap originates and gets prioritized; quarterly OKRs; testing and validation standards; platform and agent quality; the bot-building and delivery process; developer experience and AI enablement; org design, on-call, and incident culture; and capacity planning. You will have a real voice in all of it. THE TECHNOLOGY Our platform is broad, and no one person holds all of it. It spans telephony and real-time voice infrastructure; speech recognition and voice models; large language models, model orchestration, and failover across providers; the reasoning runtime that drives each conversation; the bot-building UI, domain language, and conversation-design tooling our teams use to create and tune agents; ML infrastructure and evaluation; and the big-data analytics that tell us how bots perform in production. Expect modern, cloud-native systems and a codebase where AI is part of both the product and how we build it. WHAT YOU'LL DO - 🪜 Raise the bar and build the team. Hire exceptional engineers, grow the ones you have, and make the hard calls quickly when someone is not the right fit. Be a bar-raiser in every loop you run. - ⚡ Set the pace. Create an environment where great engineers want to dig in, because the mission is exciting and their work visibly moves the needle. Push for speed, and challenge the status quo instead of defending how things have always been done. - 🤖 Make your team AI-native. Turn individual AI experimentation into team-level results: better throughput, better quality, faster paths from idea to production. Model it yourself. - 🎯 Own outcomes, not activity. Drive predictable, high-quality delivery of the work that matters most to customers, and stand behind your team's timelines. - 🧭 Shape the solution, not just the build. Your team owns how the product solves the customer's problem, not only how it is coded. Keep them close to the customer and to the bots you ship. - 🛡️ Invest in engineering excellence. Testing and validation that give real confidence in production, a fast and pleasant developer experience, and quality that customers feel. WHO YOU ARE You will recognize yourself in Replicant's three core values. Here is how they show up in this role: Blade Runner: ownership, urgency, and calculated risk. You take responsibility for outcomes and mistakes alike, move before you have perfect clarity, and prefer action over process. You care about the result far more than the ritual, and you escalate early when something is not working. Bread Maker: impact over role, humble and team-first. You contribute wherever the mission needs you, work cleanly across Product, Delivery, and your peers, and follow through so others can plan around you. Confidence without arrogance. Självdistans (self-distance): ego separated from execution. You give direct, respectful feedback early, and you receive it the same way. You name reality without spin, change your mind when the facts change, and commit once a decision is made. We are specifically looking for someone who is: - A people manager and servant leader first. You build trust, grow careers, and get the best out of senior engineers by leading through them, not around them. - Genuinely AI-fluent, and able to show it. You have gone deep on modern AI tools and can walk us through something real you built: what models, what worked, what did not. We expect our managers to lead from the front here. - Technically credible. You reason well about system tradeoffs and stay close enough to the work to earn your engineers' respect, while trusting them to own the details. - Customer-obsessed. You keep the team anchored to real customer value and close the loop after shipping. QUALIFICATIONS - 5+ years of experience managing engineers or engineering teams - 10+ years of experience in a technical field, such as software engineering - A track record of hiring, developing, and managing the performance of strong technical talent - Experience owning team budget and headcount planning - Demonstrated, hands-on AI fluency: practical experience using modern AI tools in real work, with something you can show - A history of delivering software predictably with a team - Technical depth in system design and tradeoffs, enough to earn credibility with senior engineers - Experience partnering closely with Product and other cross-functional teams PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Experience in conversational AI, voice or telephony, ML systems, or real-time infrastructure - Built or scaled testing and validation for AI or nondeterministic systems - Comfort in a lean, fast-moving, remote startup where priorities are ambitious and the bar is high LOCATION, REMOTE, AND TRAVEL - We are 100% remote. You must be legally authorized to work in the United States or Canada. - Travel is required for in-person meetings approximately every six weeks. For all full-time employees, we offer: 🌴 In-person connection that counts: company-wide offsites and smaller team gatherings designed to make remote work feel personal 🖥️ Tech & learning stipend: Conferences, books, courses — interested? We’ll fund them 📍 Remote by design: We’re distributed — no guilt about life events, we trust you to manage your calendar 🏋️ Health & wellness: Flexible vacations, paid sabbatical after 5 years, comprehensive benefits, plus a stipend to support your physical and mental well-being 💸 Compensation that matches your impact: competitive salaries in the company you’re helping to build 📈 Equity with upside: We believe in shared ownership—You’ll own a real piece of a fast-growing AI company Our Values Replicant has three core values. It is critical that everyone who joins the team feels excited and moved by these values as every new team member makes an impact on our culture. Blade Runners: We take ownership and pride to influence the outcomes of our goals. We are successful, and like a Blade Runner, use the tools at our disposal to reach our objectives. We value open and honest communication and proactively seek feedback along the way. We are a company driven to grow and achieve both individually and as a team. Bread Makers: We are humble and strive toward an egalitarian culture. No task is too big or too small. We work together to achieve our goals and develop our company mission. We believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in everything that we do. Självdistans (Self-Distance): Självdistans is Swedish for self-distance. It's the ability to critically reflect on oneself and one's relations from an external perspective. With this in mind, we act with objectivity and always remember that we are not our work. There's no perfect science to growing a team or business, but we trust everyone at Replicant to point out our blind spots and humbly admit their own. Replicant is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, diverse and equitable workplace that is built on trust, support and respect. We welcome all individuals and do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, colour, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, marital status, pregnancy, sex, citizenship, education, languages spoken or veteran status. Accommodation is available upon request at any point during our recruitment process. If you require an accommodation, please speak to your talent acquisition partner or email us at talent@replicant.ai hr@replicant.ai and we’ll work to meet your needs.