The posting
ABOUT CINDER
Cinder is the mission-critical infrastructure that keeps the world's most important digital platforms true to what they stand for. The internet has always been abused by bad actors, and AI is making it exponentially worse, driving fraud, abuse, and manipulation at a scale and speed no human team can fight alone. Cinder gives platforms one command center to fight back: to write and enforce policy, deploy AI agents against abuse in real time, investigate threats, file NCMEC reports, and prove their safety programs are working.
Our customers are some of the largest internet platforms in the world. The decisions made in our software directly determine what stays up, what comes down, and how users are treated.
We're a small, fast-moving team backed by Accel and Y Combinator. We care about being intentional, direct, and deeply focused on solving real customer problems.
WHY THIS ROLE
Cinder’s Core Infrastructure team builds the platform and infrastructure that judges the safety of much of the user-generated content on the internet. This journey requires extreme focus and ruthless prioritization. As Cinder has grown, Core Infra has become responsible for the critical pieces that underpin workstreams across the product, without a dedicated leader to organize that work. We have a small, senior team doing high-leverage work, and we need a capable people manager to ensure that effort is aimed at the right things, coordinated cleanly with the rest of the company, and never wasted on collisions or unclear ownership.
This is a people and coordination role at its core. Your job is to take a group of strong, self-directed engineers and make sure they're working on the most important things, that those priorities are clear, and that the rest of the company knows how to work with the team. You'll need enough technical depth to earn the respect of senior engineers and hold your own in architecture discussions; the team is strong enough to largely run its own execution. You'll report to our Head of Engineering and have real influence on how we build out engineering leadership as the org scales.
WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON
You'll own the health, direction, and delivery of the Core Infra team. The team owns the systems the rest of engineering builds on, including the graph service, CI/CD, and core developer tooling. It's a small team that leans senior, and its work is a genuine competitive advantage for Cinder. In practice that means:
- Setting clear priorities and a roadmap your team understands. Engineers should know what they're working on, why it matters to the business, and what we're choosing not to do. You'll bring the business context behind the work and translate it into focused execution.
- Owning the interface between Core Infra and the rest of the company. You'll be the clear point of contact for other teams, run the intake process for work coming into Core Infra, and make sure requests are triaged, routed, and prioritized transparently rather than landing through back-channels. You’ll be the default liaison to GTM, FDE, CX and other cross-functional partners, and pick up technical work alongside your team when it helps, without becoming a blocker.
- Raising the bar on team-level execution. All Engineering Managers at Cinder are focused on advancing both velocity and quality. You will implement the right level of process to keep a growing team moving fast while remaining responsive to needs of the broader engineering organization. We want to deliver robust features with clear ownership and vision - the kind of feature all of us love to see when we’re oncall.
- Coaching and developing engineers. You’ll set clear expectations against role and provide direct, constructive feedback promptly and empathetically. People should always know how they're progressing and where they need to grow.
- Driving operational rigor proactively. Helping define SLIs/SLOs for your team's systems and getting ahead of reliability and tech-debt problems to get ahead of incidents.
This role is about organizing and leading a senior team and owning its priorities and coordination, not about being its lead architect or top individual contributor. The team owns its technical execution; you own making sure it's aimed correctly and running smoothly.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- 8+ years building production software with at least 4 years in a startup environment, managing platform engineers directly. You've owned a team's delivery, not just your own, and you've grown ICs into stronger engineers.
- Deep familiarity with high-throughput, data-intensive systems, workflow/automation engines, or AI-powered platforms in production, with experience managing full stack engineers
- A track record of driving a high-performing team: clear priorities and sufficient process to drive both velocity and quality, grounded in metrics.
- Technical credibility with a senior team. You can lead architecture and trade-off discussions, review work, and earn the respect of staff-level engineers. We use AI tooling extensively and expect you to be fluent and opinionated about how it changes the way teams build.
- Experience setting roadmaps and priorities in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment, and the judgment to decide what to deprioritize.
- A real point of view on what high-performing engineering teams look like and how to measure them, with experience driving reliability, quality, or operational metrics..
- You give direct, constructive feedback as a matter of course, and you deliver it in a way people can act on.
- Clear written communication. While our company is concentrated in our NYC headquarters, this team is distributed across London and the east coast of the US. You write clearly in PRs, Slack, planning docs, and cross-functional updates.
NICE TO HAVE
- Experience in Trust & Safety or abuse prevention. Understanding how attackers exploit platforms gives you a head start.
- Experience operating at the Product ↔ Engineering boundary, or in a customer-facing engineering capacity.
LOCATION & BENEFITS
We're based in NYC and would relocate the right person for this role. We believe in working together in person and hold at least two all-company events per year. We offer health, vision & dental benefits, a 401(k) plan with employer matching, fully paid commuter benefits, and a fully stocked office with paid lunch and dinner.
