Engineering Manager

🏔️ About Sierra Studio

Sierra Studio is an AI engineering studio and startup incubator – we turn our customers’ ideas into reality! We’re based in Los Angeles, but our teammates live all around the world. We create products across all areas of software — from web and mobile apps to cutting-edge work at the forefront of AI and large language models.

💼 About The Role

As an Engineering Manager, you’ll lead one or more project teams at Sierra — owning delivery end to end while staying close to the code. You’ll set technical direction, mentor and grow the engineers around you, and partner with product, design, and clients to ship products the team is proud of. This is a hands-on leadership role: you’ll spend more of your time leading than a typical engineer, but you’ll still be in the codebase. As an early leader at a startup, you’ll also help shape our engineering culture and how we build.

Here’s a taste of what you could do at Sierra!

• Lead projects: Own the delivery of one or more client or internal projects, from scoping to shipping
• Grow the team: Mentor engineers, give feedback, and help them level up
• Stay technical: Architect solutions, review code, and jump in hands-on where it matters most
• Hiring: Help us grow the team and interview future teammates
• Client partnership: Work directly with founders and stakeholders to turn ideas into production products

🔎 Who We’re Looking For

We’re looking for an experienced tech lead ready to step fully into engineering management — someone with strong technical judgment and the communication and people skills to lead a team. You don’t need to have “Manager” in your current title; what matters is that you’ve led the direction of projects and the people on them.

If you’re excited about this role but don’t check every single box, we’d love to see your application anyway.

🧞 Leadership & management

• Experience leading project teams and owning delivery end to end
• Track record of mentoring and growing engineers
• Strong communication skills — you can align a team, manage stakeholders, and give clear feedback
• Experience turning vague asks into phased plans a team can execute
• Fluent communication in English, written and verbal (our clients are US-based)

💻 Technical depth

• You’re still hands-on — a senior engineer who leads by example and stays close to the code
• Strong architecture and technical decision-making across a project’s stack
• Ability to run and support multiple projects at the same time
• Experience with prompt engineering, RAG, and agentic patterns
• Backend: Either Python (e.g. FastAPI) or TypeScript experience
• Growth mindset: Ability to quickly learn new skills in the AI space
• Uses AI tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) to supercharge the team’s workflow

🚀 Bonus — nice to have!

• Experience building products with LLMs
• Curiosity about new developments in AI
• Experience partnering closely with product and design, and comfort shaping the "what" alongside the "how."
• Consulting or client-facing experience integrating new systems into enterprise-owned infrastructure.
• Comfort working through customer IT, security review, and change-management processes to get things live.

🌎 How We Work

Fully remote, with flexible hours — we care about output, not hours online. We support work-life balance for teammates at every life stage.

💖 Our culture

• Growth mindset: We look to magnify our strengths, take chances, and always learn from our mistakes.
• Supportive: We keep our egos out of the workplace and support each other when trying new things.
• Product & customer centric: We care deeply about our customers and clients and always keep their needs top of mind. We build tech to solve real problems.
• Ownership: We take initiative, even when it is “not our job.” As a startup, we all wear lots of hats.

💡 Why join us?

At Sierra Studio, we believe in nurturing talent and creating good vibes at work. We seek inclusion and embrace our differences. We’re all about “growth mindset”, and we look to magnify our strengths, take chances, and always learn from our mistakes. We don’t fit our teammates into boxes, and instead we understand that each person has their own unique set of skills that they bring to the table. If you join us, we’ll embrace who you are today, and give you the space and tools to keep growing.

Salary Range: 80K - 120K USD

Your exact compensation will be determined based on a variety of factors that reflect your individual qualifications and how they align with the needs of the role.