Senior Engineering Manager

About HumanSignal

Real-world data is the competitive edge in AI. HumanSignal is a human data partner for companies building AI models and products. Our customers ship better AI, faster, because we partner with their researchers from real-world data creation to annotation to delivery. We design and create datasets from scratch, recruit and manage the domain experts who evaluate model output, and run everything through our own platform, Label Studio, the open-source standard for data labeling and evaluation, used by over 1 million practitioners worldwide. We specialize in the operationally complex: real-world data collection, multimodal pipelines, and multi-step workflows. Advanced ML and AI teams use our enterprise platform to run their own data factories, and our services team to extend their reach where in-house capacity runs out. If you want to do work that materially shapes how the next generation of AI products gets built, we'd love to talk.

Role Overview

The engineers on our team are great. We want to make sure they have a manager who makes them better, and that’s the role. We’re building across an open-source platform, enterprise software, and a managed data-services business that runs on our own product. We need to make delivery more predictable while giving engineers more ownership – not add another layer of approvals. You’ll help shape what we build, the commitments we make, and how the team works.

Responsibilities

• Manage the team directly: 1:1s, feedback, performance, promotions, and the hard conversations.
• Own delivery so that what we decide to build turns into shipped software on a rhythm we can count on.
• Notice when someone is blocked and help them get unstuck without making yourself the dependency for every decision.
• Address struggles early and help people become better professionals: better at scoping, estimating, making decisions, and owning outcomes rather than tasks.
• Stay hands-on to make better technical decisions, work through difficult problems, and improve how the team builds.
• Challenge architectural decisions, explain tradeoffs, and help the team choose an approach it can ship and maintain.

What We’re Building

• A ground-up rebuild of the annotation editor, with interfaces generated by coding agents instead of hand-configured.
• Native evaluation of agent trajectories: trace ingestion, replay, and hybrid human-plus-model-judge workflows.
• Continuous calibration: treating automated evaluators as instruments that can drift and need ongoing checks against human ground truth.
• The workforce platform behind our managed services business.
• Quality analytics across annotators, models, and programs.

Success Metrics

• Engineers take greater ownership and need less intervention.
• Scope and delivery risks surface early, rather than at the deadline.
• Customer commitments and product priorities are reconciled before they become emergencies.
• Recurring escalations lead to lasting fixes.
• The team ships more reliably, people are getting better at their work, and neither depends on you repeatedly stepping in to rescue a release.

Who We’re Looking For

• You’ve managed engineers for at least a couple of years.
• You’ve hired and developed people, addressed underperformance directly, and made difficult people decisions when necessary.
• Before that, you were a strong engineer for long enough to develop sound technical judgment.
• You can reason about architecture and tradeoffs beyond your own code.
• You still build software and enjoy it.
• You use coding agents seriously and can explain, with examples, what effective use looks like.
• You’ve shipped at a startup and know how to make decisions with incomplete information.
• You say what you think early, give specific feedback, and don’t manage by avoidance.
• You can balance long-term product work with customer deadlines, negotiate realistic commitments, and recognize when a services request should become a product capability, and when it shouldn’t.

Nice to Have

• Experience with ML tooling, data platforms, or evaluation systems.
• Experience managing a distributed team.
• Frontend architecture depth.

How to Apply

Skip the form. Email me directly at michael@humansignal.com with examples of your best work. That can be code you’ve written, a system you designed, a team you built, a document that changed a decision, or a product you shipped. I want to see what you’re proud of and hear why. You don’t need a public portfolio, and please don’t share proprietary material. A description of the problem, your contribution, and the outcome is enough. A short note on what draws you to HumanSignal specifically helps too. I read everything that comes in. If it’s a fit, I’ll reach out.