[Remote] Engineering Manager - FullStack & AI Platform

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Altera AI, Inc. is building an AI litigation associate that produces verified, court-ready legal work for law firms. The Engineering Manager will lead and grow a distributed engineering team while remaining hands-on across full-stack systems, AI/ML, infrastructure, delivery, incident management, and architecture as the platform scales nationally.

Responsibilities

• Grow the engineering team from roughly six to ten. Hire, onboard, set expectations, run 1:1s, coach performance, and have the hard conversations early. Raise the floor on engineering practice without adding ceremony for its own sake — this team is small, senior and allergic to process theatre, so you'll have to earn each addition rather than install it. Mentor senior engineers into ownership and create the environment strong engineers want to stay in. The team spans the US and Offshore, full-time and contract. You'll own making that work in practice: a standup time that's civil on both ends, decisions that are legible to whoever wasn't in the room, and contract engineers who get the same clarity of expectation and investment in their growth as anyone on payroll. You'll also own the access boundary — who can see privileged client matter data, under what terms — which is a real constraint on how work gets distributed and not one you can delegate
• Own the release train: what ships, when, and the honest confidence level attached. Turn product priorities into executable engineering plans, surface scope and sequencing tradeoffs early, and push back when the requested timeline and the quality bar don't coexist. Own code review culture and the definition of done — nothing counts as done because it merged, it counts when it's verified. Run incident command, the on-call rotation and postmortems, and make sure the fix actually lands
• Stay in the code: architecture reviews, the hardest reviews, and load-bearing changes where your involvement materially improves the outcome. You should understand the system deeply enough to review critical changes yourself and know where to go deep when something doesn't add up. Partner with the CTO and Staff engineers on cross-cutting architecture — durable execution, multi-tenancy, orchestration boundaries, build-versus-buy, and the engineering half of SOC 2 — while making sure decisions remain coherent across the system. Translate between attorneys and engineers in both directions; the domain is deep and the requirements don't arrive pre-digested

Skills

• 7+ years engineering with 2+ years leading engineers and meaningful people-management responsibility, or equivalent demonstrated depth
• Remote (US) · Core working hours aligned with 9am–5pm Central
• 7+ years in software engineering, including 2+ years leading engineers and meaningful people-management responsibility , or equivalent demonstrated depth
• You've hired, developed people, managed underperformance, and handled exits when necessary
• Still genuinely hands-on. You'd pass a senior engineering interview today and you want to keep it that way
• You've scaled a system from one customer to many and remember what actually broke — usually process and observability before architecture
• You've managed engineers across a five-plus hour timezone gap, and across employment types. Not just "we had a remote person" — a team where a meaningful share of the engineering happens while you're asleep
• You know that written communication is the product of a distributed team rather than a chore, and you've seen what happens to contract engineers who get managed as a resource instead of as colleagues
• Backend and infrastructure depth in Python or an adjacent ecosystem such as Go, Java or TypeScript, with real Postgres and distributed-systems experience
• You don't need to have shipped LLM systems, but you need to be fluent enough to review the work and challenge it
• A point of view on AI-assisted engineering
• A high bar for correctness in consequential software
• Regulated, safety-critical or high-consequence domains are a strong signal
• Comfortable with early-stage reality. The roadmap moves, the customer count is small enough to name individually, and priorities get argued rather than assigned
• Nice to have: legal tech; AI/LLM products in production; SOC 2 or a comparable compliance program; scaling a small engineering team through its first major growth phase; having been the first engineering manager somewhere

Benefits

• Meaningful early equity
• Health, dental and vision
• PTO
• 401(k)
• Remote (US)

Company Overview