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Runlayer is a platform for MCPs, Skills, and Agents, enabling enterprises to deploy AI safely at scale. The company recently raised a $30M Series A (total $42M raised) and is trusted by Gusto, Instacart, Opendoor, dbt Labs, and Decagon. The founding team built AI Actions for OpenAI, shipped Zapier Agents to millions, and established the MCP protocol with Anthropic.
You will be one of Runlayer's first engineering managers, leading a pod of 6–10 engineers shipping hundreds of PRs weekly, many written by AI agents. The role offers two tracks: Product Engineering or Platform. Your responsibilities include:
• Lead and develop a pod of engineers through weekly 1:1s, career growth planning, performance management, and difficult personnel decisions
• Stay hands-on: review pull requests, ship code, and debug production incidents alongside your team
• Own delivery end-to-end: translate roadmap priorities into scoped work, maintain low cycle time, and ensure shipped features solve customer problems
• Establish and maintain quality and reliability standards: review code standards, test coverage, incidents, postmortems, and on-call rotations
• Build and run your pod's hiring pipeline: conduct interviews, raise the bar, and close candidates
• Scale AI-native development: review AI agent workload, evaluate agent-written code quality, and implement safeguards against low-quality output
• Partner with product, design, and the Chief Architect on technical strategy and implementation
The role emphasizes impact (shipping to customers in days, not quarters), excellence (working with the team that shaped MCP and AI agent infrastructure), and ownership across people, hiring, delivery, and quality.
REQUIREMENTS:
• 7+ years in software engineering, including 2+ years managing engineers
• Strong senior individual contributor background; able to go deep in design reviews and incident response
• Experience growing a team at a startup: hiring, setting standards, and making tough personnel calls
• Daily hands-on use of AI coding agents with concrete strategies for managing review overhead and code quality
• Fluent in Python or TypeScript; comfortable with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform)
• Direct communicator who gives hard feedback early and kindly
• Genuine desire to manage; people-focused, not viewing management as a detour
BONUS QUALIFICATIONS:
• Early engineer at a startup that scaled from seed through Series B or beyond
• Built security, identity, infrastructure, or developer-tool products
• Shipped to enterprise customers with strict security and compliance requirements
• Hands-on experience with MCP, agent frameworks, or LLM-backed products
• For Platform track: on-call experience and incident response leadership for production platforms
