Engineering Manager

About us

Hiver is a modern, AI-driven customer service platform used by companies across healthcare, finance, logistics, education, and technology. We help teams deliver fast, human support across email, chat, phone, WhatsApp, and more, without the complexity of legacy helpdesks.

Our platform brings shared inboxes, assignment, SLAs, automations, and analytics to support teams in the tools they already use, without the overhead of another helpdesk.

We're a challenger brand in a category dominated by over-engineered tools. We build software that is simple, powerful, and genuinely helpful, and we operate internally with the same philosophy. If you want meaningful ownership, thoughtful teammates, and work that ships, Hiver is a great place to do it.

About the Role

This is a hands-on Engineering Manager role at Hiver, built as a ~50/50 split: half in the code and technical decisions, half growing and leading the people who write it. You are a player-coach who still owns technical outcomes and can go deep when the team needs you.

Our products live inside the tools and channels customers already use. That means staying fast, adapting as the platforms we build on evolve, and keeping shared inbox data consistent for teams working together.

You'll lead a cross-functional pod spanning backend, frontend, and QA engineers at multiple levels. You own the delivery and reliability of what they ship, and you're directly accountable to engineering leadership for the KPIs that define the team's impact.

Key Responsibilities

What You'll Own

• Delivery and outcomes: predictable, high-quality shipping against a roadmap you help shape, including scope, sequencing, and trade-offs across core workflows.
• Leadership-facing KPIs: Few targets you report against to engineering leadership
• Reliability and scalability: the systems your team owns stay fast, available, and maintainable as customers and load grow.
• Team health and growth: hiring, retention, ramp, and the performance bar of your pod.

The Technical

• Stay hands-on: review critical PRs, pair on hard problems, and write code where it moves the needle, especially on high-risk or foundational work.
• Own technical design and architecture for your team's surface area, across frontend and backend. Make and defend trade-offs on scalability, latency, and maintainability.
• Keep the product fast and resilient as the platforms it builds on evolve.
• Drive AI-augmented delivery within your pod: use modern AI tooling and spec-to-code workflows to compress cycle time without compromising quality.
• Drive engineering quality: testing discipline, observability, incident response, and deliberate paydown of technical debt.
• Set and enforce the technical bar in design and code reviews.
• Depth in frontend engineering, distributed backend services, and cloud infrastructure.

The People & Delivery

• Directly manage, mentor, and grow engineers across backend, frontend, and QA, at multiple levels, through regular 1:1s, clear feedback, and honest calibration.
• Run a tight delivery process: planning, estimation, and execution that leadership can rely on.
• Own post-release quality: track escaped defects and feed the learnings back into how the team tests and reviews.
• Recruit and raise the talent-density bar by owning your team's hiring loop end to end.
• Manage performance without flinching: recognize and stretch your strongest, and address underperformance early and fairly.
• Partner with Product, Support, and the platform teams you share services with to translate business goals into technical plans and resolve cross-team dependencies.

Key Requirements

What We're Looking For

• 8-12 years in software engineering, including 2+ years directly managing engineers.
• A genuine player-coach: still technically credible and willing to be hands-on, not only a process owner.
• A proven track record shipping and operating distributed systems or SaaS products at scale. You've owned reliability and scalability, not just features.
• Strong system design and API design, with a feel for performance on both client and server.
• Comfortable owning measurable KPIs and being accountable for them to leadership.
• A clear, direct communicator who can grow people and hold a bar at the same time.

Strong Pluses

• Built products that run inside or integrate deeply with third-party platforms.
• Experience building on Gmail, Google Workspace, or other large third-party platforms.
• Experience embedding AI into the development lifecycle: AI-augmented delivery, spec-to-code or spec-to-PR workflows, or using AI to compress cycle time.
• B2B SaaS, customer-service, or helpdesk products, particularly collaborative tools where many users act on shared data.
• A background modernizing legacy systems while keeping the lights on.