Tech Lead/Engineering Manager (Series B Startup, relocation to San Francisco)

About Company/Product:

• Series B startup, headquartered in San Francisco and backed by top-tier investors
• Building a next-generation AI-first search engine and vector database, optimized for LLM interaction and enterprise use. The infrastructure is fully in-house, designed to scale to billions of documents while delivering structured, high-quality results.

About the Role:

We are now hiring a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a team of highly capable engineers and help scale one of the most performant search stacks in the world.

• Note: this is a hands-on role — you will stay close to the code and architecture. The team is also actively growing, with Backend Engineer positions open for those who prefer an individual contributor track.

What you’ll do

• Lead and grow a high-output team(5–10 engineers) working on infrastructure and product challenges.
• Own quarterly planning, technical execution, and hiring.
• Make key architectural decisions and balance rapid shipping with long-term system quality.

Some of the problems you’ll help solve:

• Scaling search to 10B+ pages in under a month (Google-level scale)
• Managing and optimizing prompts across all LLM calls
• Designing and deploying a custom vector database handling billions of vectors with

We expect that you have:

• Prior experience as a Tech Lead or Engineering Manager (5–10+ engineers)
• Hands-on programming ability in Rust, C++, or another high-performance language
• Strong product and technical intuition with a track record of fast shipping
• Experience working in small teams or startups
• English proficiency

Nice-to-have(s):

• Experience at an early-stage or hyper-growth startup
• Background in search, ML infrastructure, or large-scale distributed systems

Tech stack: Rust, AWS, Kubernetes, vector DBs, LLM infrastructure.

What we offer:

• Salary range $180K–$300K + equity
• Work format: On-site in San Francisco with full relocation & visa support (STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3)
• Unlimited vacation policy