Engineering Manager

About the company: LightTable is an AI-powered construction document review platform built for preconstruction teams. We automate cross-document conflict detection across the complex, multi-party workflows that define how large commercial projects are designed and built. We wrote our first line of code in 2025. Since then, large real estate developers and contractors have used LightTable to improve how they build data centers, bioscience labs, an airport, high-rise condos and more. We recently closed our Series A, led by Innovation Endeavors, the largest Series A of any AI-native SaaS company in Colorado history. We move fast, we care about leverage, and we build with AI, not just for our customers but internally too. The Role We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead one of two engineering pods. This is a player-coach role. You will own the people, the priorities, and the technical decisions inside your feature area, and you will be technical enough that your judgment is what makes those decisions good. Engineering is about ten people today and we expect 15–20 within a year. That is deliberate: we build with AI coding tools and believe the highest-leverage engineering org stays small. Because our codebase started in 2025, you are working with a modern React and Python stack rather than a decade of accumulated tech debt. How Engineering Is Organized We are moving to a two-pod structure, and we want to be specific about it because it shapes what this job actually is. - Two pods, split by feature area rather than by discipline. Each pod carries the full range of skills it needs, across AI, web, backend and infrastructure, so it can own complete features end to end instead of handing work across team boundaries. - You will manage roughly five to seven engineers to start, likely six to eight within twelve months. - You report to our CTO, alongside one other pod lead. He stays accountable for technical vision, core architecture, and overall team operations. You own execution, technical judgment, hiring, and people inside your pod. What You’ll Do - Lead a pod of AI and web engineers day to day: priorities, weekly cadence, unblocking, and shipping on a schedule the business can plan around. - Own technical decisions inside your feature area. Design reviews, architectural tradeoffs, and the quality bar are yours, and you stay close enough to the code to make those calls well. - Manage performance directly. Give hard feedback early, grow strong engineers into stronger ones, and hold a high bar consistently. This is one of the specific things we are hiring you to do better than we do it today. - Hire. Recruit, interview, and close engineers as the team roughly doubles over the next year, and build the interview process that makes that repeatable. - Help us figure out how to build with AI coding tools. We are still learning where Claude Code and Codex genuinely make us faster, and we want your judgment in that. - Partner with the other pod lead and the CTO to keep the pods aligned on shared architecture, clean interfaces between feature areas, and no duplicated work. - Translate technical vision into weekly reality: turn architecture direction into sprints, scope, and sequencing your team can execute. - Work directly with design partners and customers. Preconstruction teams, GCs, and data center builders will shape what your pod builds. - Navigate ambiguity and wear multiple hats. This is an early-stage company and the org chart will keep changing underneath all of us. What We’re Looking For - 10+ years coding professionally, including 3+ years leading a software team. You have owned performance and hiring, and you have been the person accountable when the team missed. - A real player-coach. You will lead a team of AI and web engineers, and you should be a doer too. You do not need to be writing code full time, but you want to stay hands-on and in the details. We have seen the purely-managerial version of this role fail, and we are not hiring for it. - Senior staff-level technical depth, roughly a P6/L6 engineer with M3 management experience. You could hold a strong IC role if you were not managing, and your team knows it. - Forward-thinking about AI coding tools. You are already working with Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, and you are still thoughtful about where they help and where they do not. - Startup experience where the lines between code, data, product, and design tend to blur, and comfort operating in that overlap. - Deep technical curiosity that has led you to expertise across an atypically broad range of topics. - Strong experience with modern React and with Python (FastAPI), or comparable full-stack depth you can transfer quickly. - Comfort building with LLMs. You have shipped something real on top of them, or you are clearly hungry to. - Based in the Denver metro area, in our downtown office 3 days a week (Mon/Wed/Thurs). Nice to Have - Past work as a startup CTO or CPO. This is a big plus. - Experience at an early-stage startup as a founding or early engineer. - Experience with data infrastructure, ML/AI tooling, or AI evaluation systems. - Experience building a hiring bar and interview loop from scratch. - A keen eye for design. Why Join LightTable AI? - We think LightTable is legitimately and objectively the most exciting AI startup in Colorado, and we would like you to come pressure-test that. - Shape the engineering org at the moment it forms. You are one of the first two pod leaders, not the tenth manager in an existing system. - Work with a CTO who is staying deeply technical, so your judgment is engaged rather than overruled. - Build an AI-first product alongside domain experts in architecture and construction. - Ground-floor opportunity with meaningful equity in a fast-growing company. - Real impact: we are building fast and partnering with some of the largest developers and contractors in the country.