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Engineering Manager

London, United Kingdom

About Instalily

InstaLILY is a New York-based AI startup working at the cutting-edge of agentic AI. We build autonomous agents at the frontier of enterprise software, machine intelligence, and human-AI collaboration.

About the Role

As the founding Engineering Manager for the London office, you will also be the sole Lead Engineer in the UK, leading the technical direction and a team of engineers building and shipping the AI agent platform that runs inside our enterprise customers' workflows. We're now building out our London engineering and sales hub, bringing New York AI energy to your city, and it's going to be electric.

You'll partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Growth to set direction, deliver on the roadmap, and grow the people on your team. You'll own a meaningful surface of the product, from architecture decisions to release quality to the careers of the engineers building it.

This is a player-coach role. We're at the stage where the best managers still read PRs, jump into hard problems, and have opinions about system design. You won't be writing code full-time, but you'll be technically deep enough that your team trusts your judgment on the hard calls.

This role is client-facing. You'll be in working sessions with enterprise stakeholders alongside your engineers, running technical discovery, defending architecture, and translating customer needs into a roadmap your team can execute. The best managers here can walk a Fortune 500 VP through a system design in the morning and run a thoughtful 1:1 with a struggling engineer in the afternoon.

Responsibilities

People

  • Manage, coach, and grow a team of 6–10 engineers across levels: set clear expectations, run effective 1:1s, give honest feedback, and develop careers
  • Communicate and work closely with the New York based Lead Engineers and VP of Engineering
  • Own performance management end-to-end: hiring, leveling, ramp, promotions, and the hard conversations when they come
  • Build a low-ego, high-bar engineering culture that mirrors the broader Instalily team: sharp, curious, customer-obsessed
  • Be a multiplier: your team should ship more and better because you're there

Delivery

  • Own delivery for a meaningful product surface; partner with Product to scope, sequence, and ship
  • Drive operational excellence: incident response, on-call rotation, code review standards, release engineering
  • Surface tradeoffs clearly to leadership; protect your team from churn while keeping them focused on what matters 
  • Identify and remove the things slowing your team down, whether that's tooling, process, or people

Technical

  • Partner with Lead Software Engineers on architecture, technical direction, and how we scale the platform
  • Stay deep enough to review designs, code, and PRs meaningfully, and to make the right call when there isn't an obvious one
  • Contribute hands-on where the work calls for it: gnarly debugging, critical migrations, key architecture proposals
  • Champion AI/ML best practices (evals, observability, agent reliability) across your team's work

Customer

  • Be present in customer working sessions; help your team turn enterprise workflows into shipped features
  • Defend architectural decisions to non-technical executives at our customers
  • Embed with customer teams alongside your engineers during major rollouts

Hiring

  • Own hiring for your team (sourcing, interviewing, closing) and raise the bar with every hire
  • Help build the interview process and the broader engineering brand at Instalily

Requirements

  • 6+ years of total software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping production systems
  • 2+ years managing engineers directly, including hiring, performance management, and growing people through promotions
  • Strong technical foundation: you can review system designs, debug production issues, and have informed opinions on AI/ML system architecture
  • AI-serious: you've led or contributed to shipping LLM-powered systems (agents, RAG, evaluation infrastructure) in production, and you have opinions on what works
  • Comfortable with the player-coach archetype: you don't want to stop being technical, and you know the team trusts you more because of it
  • Experience hiring engineers in a competitive market: sourcing, screening, closing
  • Comfortable in front of customers: you can run a working session with enterprise stakeholders and present architecture to non-technical executives
  • Strong written and verbal communication: design docs, customer-facing updates, performance feedback, and exec-level summaries
  • Track record of building strong engineering culture and developing engineers into more senior versions of themselves
  • Bachelor's or Master's in CS, engineering, math, physics, or related: demonstrated ability matters more than credential
  • Prior experience at an early- or growth-stage startup is a strong plus
  • Prior experience in a forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or client-embedded org at a B2B company is a strong plus

What You'll Get

  • Real scope: You'll own a meaningful surface of an AI platform with live enterprise customers, not a sub-sub-team in a 500-person org
  • Proven product: Customers are live; this isn't a bet on an unproven thesis
  • AI-native: In how we build, how we work, and what we sell
  • Stage: Early enough to shape how the entire engineering org grows
  • Customer access: Real seats at the table with enterprise customers; you'll learn how the largest companies in the world actually buy and deploy software
  • Global: Based in London with offices in New York and SF
  • Culture: Sharp, low-ego team that keeps raising the bar
  • Growth: The learning curve is steep, and you'll have direct exposure to executive leadership

Compensation and Benefits

Salary Range: £125,000–£140,000 per year, commensurate with experience

Equity:  Stock options awards, and refreshers for top performers

Benefits: Private medical, dental, and vision; pension contribution; in-office lunch reimbursement; wellbeing stipend; generous parental leave; PTO and UK bank holidays, and more!

Quality Over Quantity

To ensure a focused, high-quality hiring experience, we kindly ask candidates to limit their applications to 3 open requisitions at any given time. Applying strategically to roles that best align with your skills and career goals gives you the highest chance of standing out. Have you interviewed with us in the past 12 months? We encourage you to reach out directly to your previous interviewer rather than submitting a new application.

Instalily is committed to providing an inclusive and barrier-free recruitment process. If you require an accommodation, please let us know, and we will work with you to meet your needs.

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