Engineering Manager: Core Applications Platform

About Copia Copia Automation builds the version control and change management platform for industrial automation. Our customers are in oil & gas, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure: environments where the code running on PLCs, SCADA systems, and HMIs have direct safety implications. We bring modern software engineering practices to operational technology teams that have been underserved by tooling for decades. We’re a well-funded startup growing fast, with enterprise customers deploying Copia across hundreds of facilities. Our headquarters is in New York City. The Role We’re hiring an Engineering Manager to stand up and lead a brand-new Core Applications Platform team. This team’s customers are our internal product teams, and its mandate is to design, build, and own the shared, full-stack application capabilities that every product at Copia depends on; the kind of capabilities that should be solved once, well, and reused across many user types. Reporting into the VP of Engineering, you will lead a group of full-stack software engineers and partner closely with the Product, Design, and other Engineering leaders whose teams rely on what you build. You’ll support, mentor, and grow your team while staying close enough to the technology to provide meaningful architectural input, code review, and the occasional pull request. This role is a great fit for a hands-on line manager who is excited by the challenge of building a new team from scratch and shaping how an entire engineering organization builds product. You must be comfortable collaborating through ambiguity, while supporting your team to drive predictable velocity as we continue to scale the organization. What you'll do: • Build and lead the team. You will stand up a brand-new squad of roughly four senior full-stack engineers, managing the full lifecycle of hiring, onboarding, and continuous growth through weekly 1:1s and performance feedback. You’ll align individual aspirations with business needs while fostering a culture of high standards and psychological safety. • Set the charter and direction. Partnering with Engineering leadership, Product, and Design, you will define the team’s ownership boundaries and engagement models, translating high-level goals into a clear roadmap and well-scoped delivery milestones. • Treat internal product teams as your customers. You will seek to understand their pain points, prioritize ruthlessly, and ship reusable, well-documented capabilities while measuring their adoption and impact across the organization. • Drive the technical direction. You will oversee the architecture of shared full-stack platforms, including frontend frameworks, backend services, APIs, and multi-tenant primitives and ensure they scale. You’ll stay close enough to the technology to provide architectural input, code reviews, and hands-on contributions where they add the most leverage. • Own operational quality and how we work. You’ll be responsible for on-call practices, incident response runbooks, and the engineering standards (from CI/CD to ADRs and testing) that empower every product team at Copia to move faster with higher confidence. What you'll need: • 5+ years of professional full-stack software engineering experience, with at least 1–2 years of formal or informal people-leadership experience (tech lead, team lead, or direct management). • A strong technical foundation across the stack - frontend, backend, APIs, and data - and the judgment to design shared application capabilities that other engineers will want to build on. • Experience delivering a product or capability with engineers as the end users (an internal platform, SDK, design system, framework, shared services layer, or developer-tools product). You know how to treat other engineers as real customers. • Demonstrated ability to coach engineers — helping them grow technically, take on bigger scope, and develop in their careers. • Strong written and verbal communication. You can adjust your message for engineers, executives, and partner teams without losing the substance. • Sound judgment around prioritization, scope, and trade-offs, which includes knowing when to ship a focused MVP versus investing in the right foundation and when to say "no" or "not yet" to internal customers. • Empathy, humility, and high standards. You are kind to people and tough on problems. • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. Nice to haves: • Experience starting a new team from zero — defining charter, hiring the first engineers, and establishing how it works with the rest of the org. • Experience building shared application platforms, frameworks, design systems, or internal SDKs that were adopted by multiple internal product teams. • Experience with some of our stack or adjacent technologies on both sides of the wire: TypeScript / Node.js, React, Go, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, Datadog. • Familiarity with multi-tenant architecture, identity / authn / authz patterns, feature flags, and other primitives that show up repeatedly across products. • Experience standing up or improving engineering practices: incident response, on-call, ADRs, code review standards, or career ladders. • Background in B2B SaaS, developer tools, industrial automation, OT/IT, manufacturing software, or IoT.