Engineering Manager - Core Infra

About Cinder

Cinder is the mission-critical infrastructure that keeps the world's most important digital platforms true to what they stand for. The internet has always been abused by bad actors, and AI is making it exponentially worse, driving fraud, abuse, and manipulation at a scale and speed no human team can fight alone. Cinder gives platforms one command center to fight back: to write and enforce policy, deploy AI agents against abuse in real time, investigate threats, file NCMEC reports, and prove their safety programs are working.

Our customers are some of the largest internet platforms in the world. The decisions made in our software directly determine what stays up, what comes down, and how users are treated.

We're a small, fast-moving team backed by Accel and Y Combinator. We care about being intentional, direct, and deeply focused on solving real customer problems.

Why this role

Cinder’s Core Infrastructure team builds the platform and infrastructure that judges the safety of much of the user-generated content on the internet. This journey requires extreme focus and ruthless prioritization. We have talented engineers working across agents, workflows, review tooling, platform reliability, and data, but execution quality and prioritization still depend too much on individuals self-managing their priorities rather than teams that run themselves. We're hiring an Engineering Manager to own the Core Infra team end to end: to set clear priorities, raise the bar on execution quality and speed, and turn a group of strong ICs into a team that self-organizes around problems.

Management is the heart of this role, but it isn't a process-only job. Most of your time will go into leading, coaching, and unblocking your team, while you will stay close enough to the code to contribute directly, lead architecture discussions credibly, and earn your engineers' trust as a technical peer. You'll report to our Head of Engineering and have real influence on how we build out engineering leadership as the org scales.

What you'll work on

You'll own the health, direction, and delivery of the Core Infra team. In practice that means:

• Setting clear priorities and a roadmap your team understands. Engineers should know what they're working on, why it matters to the business, and what we're choosing not to do. You'll bring the business context behind the work and translate it into focused execution.

• Raising the bar on team-level execution quality. Not just shipping features, but shipping them with fewer regressions, clear ownership, and no last-minute surprises. You'll find the inefficiencies slowing your team down and fix them before they become someone's bad on-call week.

• Building a team that self-organizes. Individual heroics create single points of failure and burnout risk. You'll grow and evolve a team that can triage and share work across itself and with other teams.

• Coaching and developing engineers. You’ll set clear expectations against role and provide direct, constructive feedback promptly and empathetically. People should always know how they're progressing and where they need to grow.

• Driving operational rigor proactively. Helping define SLIs/SLOs for your team's systems and getting ahead of reliability and tech-debt problems to get ahead of incidents.

• Acting as the default liaison to GTM, FDE, CX and other cross-functional partners, and picking up technical work alongside your team when it helps, without becoming a blocker.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years building production software with at least 4 years in a startup environment, managing platform engineers directly. You've owned a team's delivery, not just your own, and you've grown ICs into stronger engineers.

• Deep familiarity with high-throughput, data-intensive systems, workflow/automation engines, or AI-powered platforms in production, with experience managing full stack engineers

• A track record of turning a group of individual contributors into a high-performing team: clear priorities, shared ownership, and execution that doesn't depend on any one person.

• Strong enough technically to earn your team's trust. You can lead architecture and trade-off discussions, review work credibly, and jump into the code when it helps. We use AI tooling extensively and expect you to be fluent and opinionated about how it changes the way teams build.

• Experience setting roadmaps and priorities in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment, and the judgment to decide what to deprioritize, not just what to do.

• A real point of view on what high-performing engineering teams look like and how to measure them, with experience driving reliability, quality, or operational metrics like DORA.

• You give direct, constructive feedback as a matter of course, and you deliver it in a way people can act on.

• Clear written communication. We're a distributed team concentrated in NYC and we work closely with customer-facing teams. You write clearly in PRs, Slack, planning docs, and cross-functional updates.

Nice to have

• Experience in Trust & Safety or abuse prevention. Understanding how attackers exploit platforms gives you a head start.

• Experience operating at the Product ↔ Engineering boundary, or in a customer-facing engineering capacity.

Location & Benefits

We're based in NYC and would relocate the right person for this role. We believe in working together in person and hold at least two all-company events per year. We offer health, vision & dental benefits, a 401(k) plan with employer matching, fully paid commuter benefits, and a fully stocked office with paid lunch and dinner.