Senior Engineering Manager

Job Description

Dispel builds network isolation and access infrastructure for critical industries, where a breach is an operational failure with real-world consequences. Our customers include critical infrastructure operators, defense contractors, and industrial enterprises that hold their software vendors to an exceptionally high bar. The Senior Engineering Manager is accountable for making that standard real.

This is a people-first, delivery-focused leadership role. You will manage 6–12 engineers across one or two teams, owning the full management lifecycle: hiring, onboarding, career development, performance management, and the hard conversations that come with it. As a direct report to the VP of Engineering, you will also co-own how engineering works at Dispel, participating in decisions about org structure, engineering-wide practices, and multi-quarter delivery strategy. Technical judgment is non-negotiable. You will read pull requests, join architecture discussions, and flag technical risk. You must understand what your teams are building to fully enable them.

Engineering at Dispel is a collaborative effort and those that show up trying to get things done and help others will receive support from the team. Dispel is growing quickly and for that reason you should be prepared to handle a significant amount of ownership and deal with some amount of chaos. If you have not been in an environment like this before you would do well to try and convince us that you can handle it during your interviews.

Requirements

Execution (Primary Focus, 70%)

• Own delivery health across all active work: track project status, identify blockers early, remove obstacles, and escalate risks to the VP of Engineering with context and a proposed path forward.
• Run effective team rituals (sprint planning, retrospectives, standups, reviews) calibrated to what your teams actually need, not a fixed process template.
• Conduct regular, substantive 1:1s with every direct report. Maintain a clear picture of each engineer's performance, goals, and career trajectory.
• Own performance management end to end: develop high performers, address underperformance directly, and document both with the specificity needed to make decisions.
• Participate in hiring loops: source candidates, conduct interviews, calibrate against the hiring bar, and contribute to offer decisions with a defensible rationale.
• Contribute to quarterly and multi-quarter planning by translating roadmap intentions into realistic capacity models, surfacing dependencies, and flagging sequencing risks.
• Maintain sufficient technical context to evaluate your teams' work. This includes reading pull requests for signal, joining architecture discussions, and escalating technical concerns.
• Drive accountability for quality standards: code review practices, test coverage, documentation discipline, and incident response follow-through.
• Partner with product and project managers to align on priorities, negotiate scope, and represent your teams' capacity honestly.

Enabling Others (Secondary Focus, 30%)

• Partner with other Engineering managers and VP of Engineering on team structure, headcount planning, career leveling consistency, and the definition of what good looks like at each IC level.
• Identify patterns across your teams (recurring process failures, tooling friction, onboarding gaps) and drive improvements that benefit engineering beyond your teams.
• Refine Dispel's hiring practices: help define the hiring bar, improve interview formats, and calibrate debriefs so decisions are consistent and defensible.
• Advocate for investments your teams need: better release pipelines, CI/CD improvements, developer tooling. Make the case to the VP with specifics about impact and cost.
• Represent engineering credibly to non-engineering stakeholders. Translate technical constraints into language that informs business decisions without oversimplifying.
• Model the culture you want to see: intellectual honesty, directness, follow-through, and genuine care for your people.

Qualifications

• 4 or more years managing software engineering teams of 5+ ICs in a product engineering environment.
• A prior career as a software engineer with enough depth to understand what good engineering looks like. You do not need to write code in this role, but you need to have written it professionally and to have strong intuitions about quality, complexity, and technical risk.
• Comfortable using coding agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) as part of your daily workflow. Addy Osmani's article Agentic Engineering roughly describes Dispel's stance on AI usage by engineers.
• Demonstrated track record of growing engineers' careers. You can point to specific people you have leveled up, describe how you identified their gaps, and explain what you did to close them.
• Experience with multi-quarter planning: you have owned delivery commitments spanning multiple sprint cycles and know how to track them, communicate about them, and recover when plans diverge from reality.
• Strong technical judgment: comfortable in architecture reviews, able to evaluate proposals critically, and able to spot when a technical decision is being made for the wrong reasons.
• Experience managing engineers on security-critical, reliability-critical, or infrastructure-adjacent software. The stakes are different when the thing you ship cannot go down.
• Demonstrated ability to operate remote-first. You have managed distributed teams and understand what remote management requires that in-person does not.
• Strong written communication. In a fully remote company, writing is your primary leadership surface: 1:1 notes, status updates, feedback, and engineering-wide contributions all need to be clear, specific, and worth reading.
• US work authorization required. Dispel requires comprehensive background checks for all employees.

Bonus Points

• Experience at a company with a security-first product or customers in regulated industries (critical infrastructure, defense, industrial control systems, financial services, healthcare).
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, FedRAMP, or IEC 62443. Not as a practitioner, but as a manager who understands what compliance costs a team and how to resource it.

Benefits

• $158,000 – $176,000 salary range
• 401(k) w/ company match
• Unlimited paid time off
• Parental leave
• Full medical, dental, vision insurance
• Life insurance
• Disability insurance
• Health savings account
• Performance bonus and equity eligible
• Remote work