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Pendo is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Pendo for Agents team, which builds AI and agent capabilities on a greenfield product surface. You will own technical direction end-to-end and be fully accountable for delivery, engineering quality, and talent development.
Day-to-day responsibilities include leading and coaching a team of approximately four engineers (growing to two teams as the product scales), owning the technical architecture for Pendo for Agents, and guiding prioritization and execution across sprint and quarterly planning cycles. You will partner closely with Product, Design, and Staff/Principal engineers on build-versus-buy decisions, particularly around LLM and agent frameworks. The role requires hands-on technical leadership—staying engaged in architecture and problem-solving while spending most time coaching and unblocking the team.
You will drive cross-functional collaboration with Product and Design, surface engineering constraints early, and maintain trust under pressure. Hiring and talent planning are core responsibilities: you own headcount planning, partner with recruiting on sourcing and offer decisions, and build the pipeline needed for product area growth. You will also champion AI-enabled operations, setting expectations that AI tooling is part of standard engineering workflow for retro synthesis, incident analysis, documentation, and onboarding.
The ideal candidate is a builder energized by undefined problems and greenfield work. You have 5+ years of engineering experience with at least 2 years in direct people management. You bring hands-on architecture experience with LLM or agent systems (RAG, tool-calling, orchestration frameworks) and can own architecture decisions, not just review them. You have delivered in early-stage product areas where patterns are still being defined, managed delivery commitments across teams, and demonstrated strong build-versus-buy judgment in fast-moving AI tooling landscapes. You have a strong technical foundation in front-end or back-end development (React, Angular, Vue, Go, Python, Java, Ruby, C#) and proven success hiring for technical roles, including interview calibration and candidate closing.
