Engineering Manager, Channels & Platform

MEET SIENA Siena is the Agent of Record for consumer brands. One agent that owns the entire customer journey, running on a shared intelligence layer no point tool can replicate. Consumer brands run ten or more disconnected tools to manage their customers. We collapse that stack into a single agent. It started with support, the hardest surface a brand has, and it expands from there: Shopping Agent, Social Agent, Siena working alongside a brand's own operators. One agent across every surface, with shared memory, shared context, and shared tools. Hundreds of brands already run real customer volume on Siena in production. This is built, working, and growing, and we are racing to build what comes next. THE TEAM We are a small, fully distributed, global team. We have built leverage into how we work, which is what lets a team this size move at the speed we do. We hire athletes. Everyone here owns real outcomes, defaults to writing over meetings, communicates with directness, and acts the moment they see something worth acting on. Low ego, high standards, fast clock. If you want to own real problems rather than close tickets, keep reading. About the role Our current Engineering Manager holds the full picture across Channels, Analytics, Agents, and Integrations. That context is bottlenecked in one person - and that's a problem we're close to feeling. We're scaling fast: Order Protection, Social Agent, Voice, and Shopping Agent are all spinning up in parallel. The team is distributed remotely across different timezones, making working hours and proper oversight hard to properly meet. This role exists to close that gap. We need someone who owns engineering execution day-to-day - taking roughly 30% of what our Engineering Manager currently holds - so they can focus on strategy, customers, fundraising, and what's next. This isn't a coordinator role. You run 1:1s, keep cycle cadence honest, write technical debt plans alongside engineers, unblock people before it becomes an escalation, and act as a genuine thought partner on the operational side. Scope changes and anything that reshapes the team are joint calls. Everything else is yours. What you'll do Delivery (≈50% of your time): Own the weekly cadence for Channels and Analytics. Our Engineering Leadership is out of the loop on day-to-day - but always knows what's happening. Work with PMs and engineering leadership to surface and sequence priorities - including the ones nobody has written down yet. Help organise backlogs and bring structure to teams operating in a fast-moving, low-process environment. Unblock engineers proactively. Identify the constraint before it becomes an escalation. Write and maintain technical debt plans with engineers, not for them. Act as a second thinker on integration strategy and capacity planning. Developer experience (≈25%): Improve the things that slow good engineers down. You don't need permission to start. Bring structure where it adds speed, and resist adding process for its own sake. People development (≈25%): Run 1:1s that leave engineers with clearer thinking, not just status logged. Deliver hard feedback directly. Have it land, not bruise. Help develop senior engineers who want to grow - including coaching engineers who have ambitions toward management. Act as a backup hiring partner: help run loops, hold the bar, partner with recruiting. What you'll bring - 3+ years managing engineers in a product-delivery capacity — you've owned outcomes, not just people - Based in a European timezone (UTC to UTC+3) — this role exists specifically to be close to engineers our Engineering Manager can't reach from their timezone - Startup or scale-up experience: you know what it feels like when there's no process and no safety net - Technical credibility - not the best engineer in the room, but credible enough that senior engineers route hard problems to you, not around you - Genuine AI/LLM fluency: you understand agentic systems, evals, and model reliability -` not ju