Engineering Manager, Siena
Channels & Platform
Plus equity or stock grants
AI-powered customer service platform
Open for applications
AI-powered customer service platform
21-100 employees
Open for applications
Plus equity or stock grants
21-100 employees
Company mission
To make exceptional customer experiences universally available and to tap into the boundless potential of human connection.
Role
Who you are
- 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 just that "AI is changing everything"
- Experience with security, compliance, or SOC-adjacent work
- Worked in a product company without a dedicated TPM or staff engineer as a crutch
- Experience managing senior engineers who don't need managing in the traditional sense - they need a thought partner, not a process owner
What the job involves
- 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
- 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 success looks like
- Day 30: You've run two 1:1 cycles with each engineer on the team. You own the Channels and Analytics weekly cadence - our engineering leadership is out of the loop, but understands what's happening. You've read the last quarter of Linear, mapped the codebase shape, and met every integration owner.
- Day 60: One concrete unblock in Channels that wouldn't have happened without you owning the planning side - even if that means surfacing refactoring potential. The security compliance work (Sprinto) is no longer single-threaded through one person: documented, distributed, or sequenced behind a milestone date. You've been to a customer meeting or shadowed the deployment team on issues to be tackled
- Day 90: A measurable delivery attributes to your planning, not your coding. Engineers proactively bring you problems they used to escalate upward - and team channels have broader engineering discussions, not just siloed problems. That's the trust signal. Our current Engineering Manager has recovered roughly one full day a week of management overhead. You work as a unit: they handle strategy, customers, and exec conversations; you handle execution, 1:1s, planning, and day-to-day unblocking. Hiring, scope changes, and anything that reshapes the team are joint calls
- Failure looks like: status reports flowing through you with no judgment added; engineers being polite but routing around you; our current Engineering Manager still running teams in practice while you sit elsewhere.
Application process
- Deadline to Apply: 14 June 2026 at 16:00 BST
Our take
Customer service plays a pivotal role in the success or failure of commerce businesses, with a good customer service experience proven to build trust and power repeat purchases. With this in mind, Siena supplies a platform for companies to automate their customer service responses with AI capable of responding in the brand's voice and acting with "almost human" empathy.
Siena's platform can be employed for a number of customer service interactions, such as answering queries or arranging refunds and returns. The idea is to reduce the workload of customer services teams, with the platform handling over 80% of day-to-day interactions so that human team members are free to focus on more important or unique cases.
The idea is certainly an interesting one, and with its potential to save commerce companies thousands on customer support it is no surprise it boasts a number of clients already. 2023 funding will go towards hiring, go-to-market plans, and further development - with the ultimate goal for Siena to become a fully autonomous agent.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (1 round)
Nov 2023
$4.7m
SEED
Total funding: $4.7m
Company benefits
- 🏠 The flexibility to work from anywhere
- 🌞 Flexible working hours
- 💸 Stock options
- 🌴 Unlimited PTO (minimum of 15 days off per year)
- 📖 Growth stipend
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Andrei Negrau
(Co-Founder & CEO)Also co-founded Cartloop and Relevon, and founded Elite Brands.
Lisa Popovici
(Co-Founder & President)Also co-founded Cartloop and Relevon, acting as COO at both as well as Head of Growth and then CMO at Cartloop.
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