Software Engineering Manager

Nylon builds AI research tools that are changing how lawyers and accountants work. 2,000+ firms across New Zealand, Australia and the UK trust our platform, from the biggest firms in the world to small specialist practices. Backed by Australasia's top VCs, we're expanding into the new markets while deepening our position in the UK and Australia.

Our engineering team is about to grow quickly. We're looking for our first Engineering Manager to lead the engineers building the Nylon product and to build the team around them.

The role

You'll own product engineering for the Core Nylon experience: the research and answer experience, identity and billing, growth. You'll own line management, delivery and hiring for this group.

The team is small tody, with a handful of passionate engineers and a funded hiring plan for you to build out your team and populate new capability squads.

What you'll be doing

• Managing the Nylon engineers: 1:1s, growth plans, performance and levelling against our six-level engineering framework
• Owning delivery, so squads ship predictably against a plan agreed with product and trade-offs are surfaced early
• Hiring a senior-heavy team, working with our Talent Lead on sourcing.
• Setting the engineering bar: code review, release quality, on-call, incident response and postmortems that change how we work
• Standing up squads as the team grows (Core, Auth & Billing, Growth)
• Staying close to the work: reading PRs, sitting in design reviews and taking a turn on the pager, without being the critical path for code

About you

• You've managed software engineers for 3+ years in a high growth SAAS environment.
• You're still technical and occassionally hands on through new AI development tooling
• You treat operational excellence as a management discipline, not something that happens to whoever is on call
• You already use AI tooling (we're passionate Claude Code builders) and have views on what it changes about how engineering teams should be shaped

Stack

• Node.js
• PostgreSQL
• AWS
• Terraform
• Jest
• Docker
• Datadog
• GitHub Actions CI/CD
• React