Engineering Manager, Channels & Platform - Siena

Meet Siena

Siena is the Agent of Record for CX, built for consumer brands like Spanx, FIGS, Brooklinen, and Grüns.

It runs as a connected multi-agent stack on top of a shared intelligence layer: agents that sell, support, listen, handle social and voice across the entire customer journey, turning every conversation into signal you can act on.

The Team

We are a small, fully distributed, global team. We have built leverage into how we work, which is what lets a team this size move at the speed we do.

We hire athletes. Everyone here owns real outcomes, defaults to writing over meetings, communicates with directness, and acts the moment they see something worth acting on. Low ego, high standards, fast clock.

About the Role

Our current Engineering Manager holds the full picture across Channels, Analytics, Agents, and Integrations. That context is bottlenecked in one person—and that's a problem we're close to feeling. We're scaling fast: Order Protection, Social Agent, Voice, and Shopping Agent are all spinning up in parallel. The team is distributed remotely across different timezones, making working hours and proper oversight hard to meet.

This role exists to close that gap. We need someone who owns engineering execution day-to-day—taking roughly 30% of what our Engineering Manager currently holds—so they can focus on strategy, customers, fundraising, and what's next.

This isn't a coordinator role. You run 1:1s, keep cycle cadence honest, write technical debt plans alongside engineers, unblock people before it becomes an escalation, and act as a genuine thought partner on the operational side. Scope changes and anything that reshapes the team are joint calls. Everything else is yours.

What You'll Do

• Delivery (≈50% of your time): Own the weekly cadence for Channels and Analytics. Work with PMs and engineering leadership to surface and sequence priorities. Help organize backlogs and bring structure to teams operating in a fast-moving, low-process environment. Unblock engineers proactively. Write and maintain technical debt plans with engineers. Act as a second thinker on integration strategy and capacity planning.
• Developer Experience (≈25% of your time): Improve the things that slow good engineers down. Bring structure where it adds speed, and resist adding process for its own sake.
• People Development (≈25% of your time): Run 1:1s that leave engineers with clearer thinking. Deliver hard feedback directly. Help develop senior engineers who want to grow, including coaching engineers with ambitions toward management. Act as a backup hiring partner.

What You'll Bring

• 3+ years managing engineers in a product-delivery capacity—you've owned outcomes, not just people.
• Based in a European timezone (UTC to UTC+3)—this role exists specifically to be close to engineers our Engineering Manager can't reach from their timezone.
• Startup or scale-up experience: you know what it feels like when there's no process and no safety net.
• Technical credibility—not the best engineer in the room, but credible enough that senior engineers route hard problems to you, not around you.
• Genuine AI/LLM fluency: you understand agentic systems, evals, and model reliability.
• Experience with security, compliance, or SOC-adjacent work.
• Worked in a product company without a dedicated TPM or staff engineer as a crutch.
• Experience managing senior engineers who don't need managing in the traditional sense—they need a thought partner, not a process owner.

What We're Not Looking For

• Someone who needs a fully defined process to operate.
• Someone who comes in wanting to redesign the org or introduce career ladders before shipping anything.
• Someone whose answer to "what did your team ship?" is "that was a PM call".
• Someone whose primary achievement track is headcount growth, org structures, or reporting lines.
• Someone pitching a VP trajectory or dotted-line authority on day one.

What Success Looks Like

• Day 30: You've run two 1:1 cycles with each engineer on the team. You own the Channels and Analytics weekly cadence. You've read the last quarter of Linear, mapped the codebase shape, and met every integration owner.
• Day 60: One concrete unblock in Channels that wouldn't have happened without you owning the planning side. The security compliance work (Sprinto) is no longer single-threaded through one person. You've been to a customer meeting or shadowed the deployment team.
• Day 90: A measurable delivery attributes to your planning, not your coding. Engineers proactively bring you problems they used to escalate upward. Our current Engineering Manager has recovered roughly one full day a week of management overhead.
• Failure looks like: status reports flowing through you with no judgment added; engineers being polite but routing around you; our current Engineering Manager still running teams in practice while you sit elsewhere.

Why Siena?

• Real ownership: Own problems, not tasks, with the autonomy to solve them your way.
• Work that ships and matters: What you build reaches real consumer brands fast.
• A category we are creating: The Agent of Record is new ground, with unsolved problems and cutting-edge models.
• A team that respects your judgment: Globally distributed, async-first, low bureaucracy.
• Great salary plus equity or stock grants: Own a piece of what you build.
• Learning budget: If you are growing, so are we.
• AI-fluency by default: Access to premium accounts (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity Pro, Cursor, Lovable) plus a quarterly budget for new tools.