SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Plume is a Series F-funded SaaS platform delivering smart home and connected device services to over 60 million locations globally, managing 3+ billion devices. The company has built an open, hardware-independent service delivery platform using WiFi, AI, and machine learning for ISPs, enterprises, and small businesses.
You will manage one of Core Engineering's delivery teams as an Engineering Manager, leading 10-30 firmware, backend, and QA engineers across multiple regions. This is a hands-on-adjacent people leadership role where you own team health, growth, and output while remaining close enough to the technology to make informed decisions on scope, sequencing, and technical trade-offs.
Key responsibilities include:
**Lead the team:** Manage, coach, and develop a globally distributed team of firmware, cloud, and QA engineers. Run 1:1s, career development, performance reviews, and compensation cycles. Own end-to-end hiring—sourcing, interview design, closing, and onboarding engineers onto a complex embedded + cloud stack. Build a collaborative culture around code review, design review, and demos that works across regions.
**Own delivery:** Drive sprint planning, review, demo, and retrospectives on the CORE board. Keep the backlog groomed, parented, and honestly estimated. Partner with Product Management to take quarterly requirements through grooming into epics and stories; push back early when scope, dependencies, or capacity don't align. Own release readiness across Alpha, Beta, and GA phases—entry/exit criteria, blocker triage, validation coverage, and clear status reporting. Track and unblock cross-team dependencies with Product Engineering, Integration Engineering, Cloud/CSS, DevOps, and InfoSec.
**Own technical direction:** Partner with technical leads and architects on platform strategy, including the transition from stateful, driver-coupled OpenSync design toward stateless, standards-compliant, SDK-conformant operation over USP. Make and defend architectural trade-offs across three device platforms and cloud services. Raise the engineering bar on build times, branch hygiene, test automation, flaky testbeds, and observability.
Required qualifications: 13+ years in software engineering with 3+ years directly managing engineers, including hiring and performance management. Strong technical grounding in either embedded Linux networking (Wi-Fi/networking firmware, embedded build systems like Yocto/OpenWrt/OpenEmbedded, C, hardware debugging) or distributed cloud services with genuine fluency in the device side. Demonstrated ownership of a release train and shipped firmware or cloud products at scale.
