Engineering Manager, Channels & Platform at Siena

MEET SIENA Siena is the first intelligence layer for customer experience. We're creating an operating system of AI agents that learn, remember, and act across every customer touchpoint—from support conversations to shopping experiences to voice and social media interactions. Siena doesn't just automate support; it powers shopping agents, builds persistent customer memory, generates actionable business insights, and creates empathetic interactions that feel human. We're transforming how businesses understand and connect with their customers, turning every interaction into intelligence that makes the next one better. THE TEAM We're a small, distributed team that punches way above our weight. Every person here has outsized impact because we've built leverage into everything we do. This philosophy makes us faster and, frankly, more fun to work with. If you're excited about building something that doesn't exist yet, keep reading. We're building agents that don't just respond to customers—they remember them, learn from every interaction, and connect experiences across channels. 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 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 we're not looking for - Someone who needs a fully defined process to operate - Someone who comes in wanting to redesign the org or introduce career ladders before shipping anything - Someone whose answer to "what did your team ship?" is "that was a PM call" - Someone whose primary achievement track is headcount growth, org structures, or reporting lines - Someone pitching a VP trajectory or dotted-line authority on day one 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. WHY SIENA? - Meaningful impact. Your work directly shapes our product and company. - Globally distributed team working at the bleeding edge of CX and AI. - Great salary plus the opportunity for equity or stock grants. - Learning budget. If you're growing, so are we. - The thrill of building something new. Join us at a stage where your contributions matter most. - AI-fluency. Make AI your second nature. - Tackle unsolved problems. We’re redefining how customer experience will look like in the next decades. OUR VALUES The people who thrive here are curious, customer-obsessed, and take ownership without being asked. They fix problems first and explain later. They're direct about feedback—both giving and receiving it—because they care more about getting things right than being polite. They maintain high standards while moving at startup speed, and they build real relationships with teammates because they know that's how great work gets done. When things get tough, they adapt and keep pushing forward. OUR APPROACH TO AI The people who thrive here treat AI like a natural extension of themselves. They've built their own ecosystem of agents - some for research, others for debugging, writing, analysis, or writing code. They know which AI works best for what problem. Everyone gets premium accounts (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity Pro, Cursor, Lovable) plus a quarterly budget for new tools. But the magic happens in how we share knowledge. Demo days where someone shows off a clever workflows. Slack threads about which model handles a specific use case better. Learning from each other's AI workflows. At Siena, we’re not just looking for people who can do a job. We’re looking for people who want to break boundaries, create the future, and reshape industries. If that’s you, we look forward to your application. We use AI-assisted screening tools as part of our hiring process. All decisions are made by humans. You can request a human-only review at [Upgrade to PRO to see contact]. Siena provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.