About the Role

What are we doing?

Who are we?

Key Responsibilities

• Lead a team of 8–15 engineers spanning full-stack, frontend, backend, and platform work — owning the team's delivery, quality, and morale.
• Build a high-performance engineering culture rooted in ownership, craft, candid feedback, and shared accountability. Set the bar for what "good" looks like and hold the team to it.
• Make sure the team is used effectively — match people to problems thoughtfully, remove blockers quickly, and protect focus so engineers can do their best work.
• Drive operational excellence in how the team plans, ships, and supports its software: sprint/iteration rhythm, code review standards, on-call practices, incident response, and post-mortem discipline.
• Provide strong technical guidance during architecture reviews, design discussions, and trade-off conversations — even though you won't be writing code yourself. Push back where it matters and unblock when the team is stuck.
• Partner cross-functionally with Operations, AI/ML, electrical engineering domain experts, and other engineering leaders to align roadmap, dependencies, and customer commitments.
• Grow the team — recruit, interview, onboard, and retain engineers. Coach engineers across the spectrum from new hires to staff-level ICs, and develop the next generation of tech leads.
• Run performance management with care and clarity — set expectations, give regular feedback, deliver reviews, and make tough calls when the team's standards aren't being met.
• Adapt to evolving project needs and take on various roles as required in a startup environment — including reshaping team structure as the company grows.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of direct people-management experience leading software engineering teams of at least 5 engineers, with proven success scaling teams.
• Track record of leading teams that span full-stack web development — frontend, backend, and/or platform — and a clear understanding of how to allocate work across that surface area.
• Hands-on background as a software engineer earlier in your career, with experience shipping production web services on a major cloud (e.g. AWS).
• Knowledge of service architecture: API design, service boundaries, observability, reliability, deployment practices, and the operational realities of running web services in production.
• Demonstrated success building a high-performance team culture — including how you've raised the bar on code quality, technical rigor, and team velocity.
• Excellent written and verbal communication — able to clearly convey trade-offs, expectations, and decisions to engineers, peers, and leadership.
• Experience hiring strong engineering candidates at all levels and running a thoughtful interview process.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience managing a team that included frontend (React or similar) and Node.js/TypeScript backend engineers.
• Familiarity with AI/ML systems — what it takes to ship them, evaluate them, and operate them in production.
• Experience working in a high-growth startup environment where team structure and priorities shift frequently.
• Familiarity with the realities of supporting enterprise customers (SLAs, SOC2 compliance).
• Experience working with cross-functional partners in complex technical domains (hardware, EDA, scientific computing, etc.).
• Background contributing to or operating engineering organizations of 30+ engineers — bringing patterns and instincts from larger teams without forcing process the team doesn't need.

• People-first leader. You get genuine satisfaction from seeing engineers grow, and you measure your success through your team's success.
• High-trust, high-candor. You give direct feedback with care, and you build the kind of psychological safety where engineers tell you when something is off.
• Strong technical voice without ego. You can hold your own in a design review and push back where it matters — but you don't need to be the smartest person in the room.
• Bias to action with high ownership. You don't wait for perfect information; you make calls with what you have and adjust - treating Cadstrom’s outcome as your own.
• Strategic thinker. You balance shipping today's roadmap with investing in the team's long-term capability.
• Calm in ambiguity. Startups change fast; you can create clarity for your team when the picture is fuzzy.
• Self-aware and coachable. You actively seek feedback on your own management and grow from it.
• Embraces the ethos of "We, not I."

Why you'll love working with us

• Early Stage Equity Package – We want owners, not employees. You'll receive meaningful early-stage equity in a high-growth company, because we want you to share in what we build.
• Impact – You'll have the chance to make a significant impact not only for our customers, but on how the industry as a whole approaches test and validation.
• Care – we believe strongly in caring for each other. We encourage our people to bring their whole selves to work, support each other, and ensure they are happy in and out of the workplace.
• Leading benefits - we invest deeply in the health and wellbeing of our team with leading startup benefits, 0% copay across the board, and a $2k/year HSA.
• World-Class Backers – Cadstrom is backed by world-class investors: Bison Ventures (Bill Gates), Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt), and the Allen Institute for AI (Paul Allen).

All are Welcome.