Founding Engineering Manager, London

About the Role As the founding Engineering Manager for the London office, you will also be the sole Lead Engineer in the UK, leading the technical direction and a team of engineers building and shipping the AI agent platform that runs inside our enterprise customers' workflows. This is a player-coach role focused on architecture, release quality, and developing engineers, with client-facing responsibilities in enterprise sessions and translating customer needs into a roadmap your team can execute. What You'll Do

• Lead a team of 6-10 engineers across levels; set expectations, coach, and develop careers; partner with NY Lead Engineers and VP of Engineering
• Own end-to-end performance management: hiring, leveling, ramp, promotions, and tough conversations
• Build a high-bar, low-ego engineering culture aligned with Instalily's values
• Deliver meaningful product surfaces; collaborate with Product to scope, sequence, and ship
• Drive operational excellence: incident response, on-call rotation, code review standards, release engineering
• Communicate tradeoffs clearly to leadership; protect team from churn while focusing on impact
• Identify and remove blockers (tooling, process, or people); improve throughput
• Partner with Lead Software Engineers on architecture and platform scaling; review designs and PRs; contribute hands-on when needed
• Champion AI/ML best practices (evaluations, observability, agent reliability)
• Be present in customer sessions; defend architectural decisions to executives; embed with customer teams during major rollouts
• Own hiring for the team; help build interview process and strengthen Instalily's engineering brand What We're Looking For
• 6+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems
• 2+ years managing engineers directly (hiring, performance mgmt, promotions)
• Strong technical foundation: review system designs, debug production issues, informed opinions on AI/ML system architecture
• AI-serious: shipped LLM-powered systems (agents, RAG, evaluation infrastructure) in production
• Player-coach mindset; still technical and trusted by the team
• Experience hiring engineers in competitive markets
• Comfortable in front of customers; run working sessions and present to non-technical executives
• Excellent written and verbal communication; design docs, customer updates, performance feedback, exec summaries
• Track record of building strong engineering culture and growing engineers
• Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering/Math/Physics or related; demonstrated ability matters more than credential
• Prior startup experience a strong plus; experience in forward-deployed/solutions engineering or client-embedded org at a B2B company is a strong plus Nice to Have
• Prior experience in early- or growth-stage startups is a strong plus
• Experience in forward-deployed or client-embedded roles at B2B companies is a strong plus
• UK-based or London presence (optional) Compensation & Benefits
• Salary range: £125,000 - £140,000 per year
• Equity: stock options and refreshers for top performers
• Benefits: private medical, dental, and vision; pension contribution; in-office lunch reimbursement; wellbeing stipend; generous parental leave; PTO; UK benefits