Engineering Manager - FullStack & AI Platform

Engineering Manager — FullStack & AI PlatformLocation: Remote (US) · Core working hours aligned with 9am–5pm CentralType: Full-timeCompensation: $200,000–$250,000 + meaningful early equityBenefits: Health, dental and vision; PTO; 401(k)Experience: 7+ years engineering with 2+ years leading engineers and meaningful people-management responsibility, or equivalent demonstrated depthAbout AlteraMost engineers want to join a rocket ship. We want engineers who can build one.Altera is building an AI litigation associate—not another chatbot or copilot bolted onto a document editor. We’re building a system that takes a real case file, works through it the way a great litigation associate would, and produces work that can actually be filed in court: the right arguments, the right record, the right local rules, and every factual assertion and citation verified before an attorney puts their name on it.We’re already live, with real lawyers using Altera to produce real court filings. Now comes the hard part: scaling it. Over the next year, we’re going from two jurisdictions to national coverage of the civil litigation market while growing the engineering team alongside it. Small and mid-size firms are our entry point, not our ceiling.We’re competing in a market with companies that have more engineers, more capital, and a head start. We don’t plan to beat them by becoming a slower version of them. We plan to build a small, exceptional engineering organization that can move faster without compromising the standard required when our software produces work that gets filed in court.The RoleCan you build the engineering team that builds a category-defining company?This is hands-on engineering leadership—roughly 60% leading and 40% building—for someone who doesn’t want to choose between building great systems and building the team behind them.You’ll take an engineering team of roughly six across backend, AI/ML, frontend, and QA and grow it to around ten over the next year. You’ll help decide who joins, how we work, what great engineering looks like here, and which processes earn the right to exist. The goal isn’t more process. It’s an engineering system that lets a small senior team move quickly, maintain a high bar, and become more effective as it grows.At the same time, you’ll lead the transition from one design-partner firm we can phone when something breaks to many firms depending on us every day. That shift changes almost everything: how we architect, release, test, observe, support, prioritize, handle incidents, and prove that what we’re shipping is actually correct.You’ll be the CTO’s primary engineering leadership partner, working closely with the CTO and Staff engineers on architecture while owning the team’s execution and delivery. You’ll turn product priorities into credible engineering plans, make scope and sequencing tradeoffs explicit, surface risks before they become surprises, and push back when the timeline and the quality bar don’t coexist.You’ll also stay close enough to the code to know when the system is telling you something the status report isn’t. You’ll review load-bearing changes, go deep when something doesn’t add up, and help keep technical decisions coherent across backend, AI, infrastructure, frontend, and quality.There aren’t layers of management between you and the outcome. If the team becomes faster, more rigorous, and more capable as it grows, you’ll have built much of the system that made that happen. If delivery becomes unpredictable, quality slips, or strong engineers aren’t doing their best work, you’ll be responsible for diagnosing why and changing the system around them.We’re building the engineering organization for the company we intend to become—not the company we are today. You’ll help build both the product and the organization capable of scaling it.What you'll ownPeople. 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.Delivery. 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.Technical. 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.What we're looking for7+ 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. Our team ships with these tools daily. You'll own what "reviewed" means when most of a diff is model-generated, keep review throughput from becoming the bottleneck as volume rises, and make sure the speed shows up as shipped quality rather than review debt.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.How we workWe move fast and we use AI coding tools heavily to do it — and every merge is gated on formatting, static typing, tests, migration checks, and substantive human review. Every pull request ships with a written self-review; CI rejects it otherwise. The speed comes from the tooling, not from a lower bar.Written-first, with the reasoning behind decisions recorded and durable. Small, senior, low-ego. Today we run a daily standup and two-week sprints, with deliberately few other meetings. We care more about whether the system works than preserving any specific ceremony.Real customers with real deadlines — the feedback loop is short and unforgiving in the good way.Altera AI is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate on demonstrated ability, and we will consider qualified applicants regardless of background.