Engineering Manager, Software (AI Cloud)

ROLE SUMMARY Firmus Technologies is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Firmus AI Cloud. Your objective is to make AI infrastructure something any builder can run without friction, human or agent. You are accountable for both the people and the delivery: the engineers you grow and the software they ship. Your team builds and operates the customer-facing software of the Firmus AI Cloud: the public APIs and control plane, and the web console, SDKs, CLI, and Terraform provider on top of them, so customers can provision and run GPU compute quickly and reliably. You run these as products, investing in engineers experience, reliability, and a low-friction self-service journey for customers. You are the escalation point above first-line operations and own the cross-cutting decisions your team shares. This is a build-and-grow leadership role: you build the team that scales our AI Cloud toward gigawatt-scale AI factories across the regions and grow your scope as you earn it. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES • Team Leadership & Growth Be the Single-Threaded Owner (STO) for your squads: their engineers and tech leads report to you, and you work alongside product, architecture, and delivery peers. Hire strong engineers, develop them through coaching and clear feedback, and manage performance directly. Own the org design, headcount planning, and engineering culture for your group, building a team that raises its own bar rather than depending on you. • Delivery & Execution Own end-to-end delivery for your team. Turn the product roadmap into sequenced, predictable delivery, shaping prioritisation with product and working with tech leads on sprint planning and release gates. Own the cross-squad dependencies that determine whether the product ships on time, keep delivery health visible through metrics, and balance velocity against reliability and technical debt. • Technical Direction Stay technically credible and set the engineering quality bar across your squads. You are accountable for making sure the right cross-cutting decisions get made and driven to closure, such as build, buy, or open source, API and control-plane design, the contracts customers build against, and the product SLAs your teams commit to. Keep design and code review rigorous and unblock the hard problems that stall delivery. Champion AI-assisted development so your teams ship faster without lowering the design, review, or security bar. • Operational Excellence & Governance Own the reliability and security of the software your squads run in production. Act as the escalation point above the operations centre, accountable for L3 incident resolution, SLA-breach response, and post-mortems that convert into runbook and prevention work. Set the standards for SLOs, on-call, and change management. Govern how AI-generated code and agentic workloads reach production, extend Firmus' existing SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 controls as the product scales into new regions, and own the cost efficiency of what your team operates, balancing reliability, performance, and speed against infrastructure spend. • Stakeholder & Customer Communication Represent your team to engineering leadership and the CTO, clear about progress, risk, and the decisions you need. Own the engineering side of the customer relationship: lead customer technical briefings, and represent engineering directly when escalations turn on delivery, reliability, or product architecture. Align with product, who own the roadmap and customer outcomes, with the architects on technical direction, and with delivery and operations so the product ships and runs as one system, not a set of parts. SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE Education • Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical field. People and Delivery Leadership • 4+ years managing engineers, with direct ownership of hiring, growth, and performance for a team of at least 8 engineers. • Track record building high-performing, self-improving engineering teams and a strong delivery culture. • Proven track record delivering complex software at scale, making delivery predictable across multiple teams and dependencies. • You thrive in a fast-paced, high-growth environment and make sound decisions with incomplete information, reprioritising as business requirements change. • Experienced with AI-assisted development and agentic AI, and able to lift your teams' throughput and quality with these tools. Software and Technical Depth • 10+ years in software engineering, including a strong hands-on background as a senior or staff engineer before moving into management. You are still able to reason about architecture in depth and intend to stay close to the technology. • Deep experience designing and operating customer-facing APIs and control-plane services in production, including API contracts (OpenAPI or gRPC), versioning, and the SDKs, CLI, or IaC providers built on top. • Experience building multi-tenant, secure-by-default software at scale: identity and authorization, tenancy isolation, API gateways and rate limiting, and billing or metering. • Fluent in a modern backend stack (Go, Python) on a cloud-native foundation: Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD, with enough depth to hold your own in design reviews and make sound technical trade-offs. • Experience delivering customer-facing web applications (React or similar), including the API-to-UI contracts that make a console feels like one product. • Comfortable reviewing code and holding a high bar in design and code review. Operations, Security and Cost • Experience owning operational excellence for production systems: reliability and SLOs, on-call and incident management, and change control. • Experience owning security and compliance for production systems, ideally against frameworks such as SOC 2 Type 2 or ISO 27001. • Comfortable owning the path to production for AI or agentic workloads, including how AI-assisted development is reviewed and security-gated. • Ownership of infrastructure, platform or software cost as part of running a team, with the judgement to balance cost against reliability and speed. • Willing to take part in the incident-response on-call rotation for the services your team owns. • Willing to travel overseas occasionally when the role requires it. Stakeholder and Business • Strong stakeholder management: partnering with product, presenting to senior technical leadership, and briefing enterprise or government customers on technical trade-offs. • Able to connect engineering investment to business outcomes, weighing customer value, cost, risk, and platform scalability when you set priorities. • Clear and effective written and verbal communication in English. You can explain a delivery or architectural trade-off to a CTO or customer without losing the substance. Location & Reporting • Location: Singapore • Report to: Senior Manager, Platform Engineering