Founding Engineering Manager

As Founding Engineering Manager, you will initially lead five engineers across core backend, frontend and forward-deployed engineering. You will report to Miguel Martinez, CTO, and connect these functions so customer feedback, product needs and engineering work inform one another.

Expect approximately 60% hands-on engineering / 40% team management, with the balance changing as priorities evolve. This is a guide to the role, not a fixed weekly coding quota. You will personally implement, troubleshoot and unblock work as well as take responsibility for hiring, coaching and performance.

Chainloop helps engineering teams govern software delivery through evidence, policies and traceability. Its platform brings context to how software is built and released, including AI-assisted development, so teams can ship trusted software faster.

Your work connects product engineering with how customers build and deliver software. You will help the team turn that context into a useful product and a sustainable way of shipping it.

• Write and ship code, investigate difficult problems, and unblock engineers through practical technical work and sound architectural decisions.
• Own day-to-day execution of the engineering roadmap. Turn ambiguous goals into clear priorities, make pragmatic tradeoffs and protect the team's focus.
• Partner with the CTO on roadmap decisions and future resource needs. Keep backend, frontend and forward-deployed work aligned.
• Build the team: take responsibility for hiring and onboarding, run useful 1:1s, coach engineers, support career development and address performance clearly.
• Establish a lightweight delivery rhythm with clear written decisions and async updates. Use process where it helps engineers deliver, and adjust it when it gets in their way.
• Improve how the team uses AI, automation and engineering tools. Show where these improve implementation, quality or delivery through your own work.
• Collaborate with founders, product and sales to understand priorities and customer needs, then translate them into actionable engineering work.

Start by learning the product and stack, meeting each engineer, and understanding customer and company priorities. Ship something personally, establish regular 1:1s and run delivery iterations with the team.

As you learn where the team needs support, shape individual growth plans, improve the delivery rhythm and help hire and onboard engineers. Over time, strengthen collaboration across engineering functions and improve AI, automation and tooling. The priorities will evolve with the business and what you learn.

• A strong engineering background with personally owned delivery of complex systems. You still code, investigate problems and can explain recent implementation decisions and tradeoffs.
• Real responsibility for building and managing an engineering team. You have hired, coached and developed engineers and taken responsibility for performance. We assess the scope and outcomes of that work.
• Experience delivering autonomously in at least one startup or agency building client products from scratch. You can clarify unfamiliar needs, decide what to do and personally implement solutions without ready-made procedures or support departments to hand work off to.
• Clear spoken and written English for distributed collaboration. You can keep people aligned through concise async communication and useful conversations.
• Practical use of AI and automation, with examples of your own contribution and the effect on engineering work.

The environment includes Go, Kubernetes, CI/CD and cloud-native systems. Strong transferable engineering experience and a willingness to learn this stack are welcome; an exact stack match is not required.

Experience with developer tooling, software supply-chain security or delivery governance is useful, but optional. We want to understand what you built, how you worked with engineers and what changed as a result.

Your team-building and autonomous delivery experience can come from different roles. What matters is your personal contribution across your career and your ability to stay hands-on today.

Warsaw, Poland - hybrid, 2-3 office days/week. You will also work with a distributed team and customers, so occasional schedule flexibility is part of the role.

Compensation is USD 100,000+ annually (B2B). This is contractor invoice compensation, not guaranteed take-home pay. The B2B agreement is with the US company through Deel.

You should want to write code and solve technical problems yourself while taking responsibility for the people doing the work. Team hiring, coaching and performance are part of the job alongside technical delivery.

You will need to be comfortable with changing priorities and building ways of working as you go. When a new problem has no established process, you will help define the need, choose an approach and make it work. The Warsaw office commitment needs to fit how you want to work.

Start with a TalentFlank screening conversation about your current engineering work, team building, autonomous delivery, motivation and practical alignment, including English, compensation and availability. We then share your application and screening summary for Chainloop's review.

If you move forward, expect approximately 45 minutes with Miguel Martinez, the CTO. He may request a take-home task if he needs more evidence. The final conversation is with Daniel Liszka, the CEO.