The posting
ABOUT MARIANA MINERALS
Mariana Minerals is a software-first, vertically integrated minerals company on a mission to supply the critical minerals powering modern energy, AI, and defense technologies. We’re reimagining the minerals supply chain by combining deep industry expertise with advanced software, automation, and data-driven decision-making.
ROLE OVERVIEW
Mariana Minerals is looking for an Engineering Manager to build and lead a team of software engineers working on the critical minerals supply chain that supports the world's energy transition.
Our software team builds MarianaOS, the operating system for how Mariana engineers, constructs, and operates its mines and mineral processing facilities. The work spans capital projects, plant operations, autonomous equipment, and the data systems that connect them. Our users are our own project engineers, construction teams, and operators at our copper site in Moab, Utah and lithium facility in East Texas. That creates an unusually short feedback loop: what your team ships can change what happens on the ground within days.
As an Engineering Manager, you will own the performance and growth of your engineers and the team's ability to deliver reliably. You'll be responsible for 1:1s, feedback, performance reviews, career development, hiring, compensation input and advocacy, and delivery against roadmap commitments.
You'll partner closely with tech leads, senior engineers, and product managers. Tech leads and engineers own technical direction within the team's domains; product managers will own priorities; you own the team—how it grows, how it works, and whether it delivers. We expect managers to stay technically engaged and contribute hands-on when that is the highest-leverage use of their time, while prioritizing the work only a manager can do.
We also expect engineering managers to apply an engineering mindset to management itself. You should help define and continuously iterate on the metrics we use to understand engineering performance, and build the tools and systems that make those metrics useful in practice. That means developing a clear picture of where work is getting stuck, how reliably the team is delivering, where engineers need support, and where process is creating unnecessary friction. As agentic tooling becomes more capable, we expect managers to actively explore how agents and automation can improve management workflows; synthesizing project and team context, surfacing risks and action items, and increasing velocity.
We move quickly. Our engineers ship, get feedback from the people running our plants and job sites, and iterate. Creating the conditions for that pace—and preserving it as the team grows—is central to this role.
Our stack is TypeScript and React on the front end, Node and Python services, Postgres, and AWS, with a growing amount of LLM and agent tooling in production.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Build and lead a team of software engineers, owning 1:1s, feedback, performance reviews, career development, and compensation input and advocacy.
- Own the hiring funnel for your teams, from sourcing and interviewing through closing and onboarding, shaping the team's mix of skills, seniority, and ownership as it grows.
- Deliver predictably against roadmap commitments. Give Product a counterpart who can say what is technically possible, how long it will take, and what it will cost in schedule or reliability, and give Product, Operations, and leadership early warning when something is slipping.
- Create the conditions for the team to ship quickly and iterate from real feedback, working directly with the engineering, construction, and operations teams who use what you build.
- Break down ambiguous problems, sequence the work, and keep the team unblocked, using a planning cadence that fits how the team operates.
- Partner with your Tech Lead and senior engineers on technical direction, staying close enough to the architecture to maintain a high bar.
- Build a resilient team by growing engineers into larger scope, addressing morale and conflict early, and reducing critical dependencies on any one person.
- Run the team's review, documentation, and ownership practices so the work survives the person who built it.
WHAT YOU'LL BRING
- 3-5+ years managing software engineers directly, including performance management, career development, and hiring.
- 8+ years in software, with the technical depth to make sound tradeoffs alongside strong Tech Leads and senior engineers.
- You can review a design or a change you didn't write, spot the flaw, and give feedback that makes the engineer better.
- A track record of teams delivering predictably under real deadlines, with estimates and commitments stakeholders learned to trust.
- Demonstrated success growing engineers through promotions, expanded scope, and increasing ownership.
- Strong experience translating between non-technical stakeholders and engineering teams, including communicating technical constraints clearly.
- A bias toward shipping and learning from feedback rather than waiting for a complete plan.
- Experience bringing structure to ambiguous, fast-moving problems.
- Startup experience in a rapidly scaling company is helpful but not required.
- Experience in manufacturing, industrial automation, mining, or capital projects is beneficial but not required.
OUR CULTURE IS BUILT ON FOUR PRINCIPLES:
Everyone Gets Home Safe. We never put speed or cost ahead of people.
Extreme Ownership. We take full responsibility for outcomes, relentlessly driving toward solutions.
Engineer Out Requirements, then Automate. We simplify, optimize, and then automate for scale.
Share Your Legos. We collaborate openly, share knowledge, and empower each other to build bigger, better solutions.
Join us as we build the future of responsible mineral sourcing and supply!
