Engineering Manager (human)

NEURA's Core Robot Software department is scaling through a deliberate structural transition. At ~50 engineers, one Technical Lead can no longer maintain meaningful career conversations with every engineer while also running sprint allocation across eight concurrent product streams. Engineering Managers are the answer to that specific problem — and this is one of those roles.

Your mission is to make 18–22 robotics software engineers as effective as possible over time: growing in their careers, performing well, and doing well as people. Technical architecture is not your domain — that is owned by Staff Engineers and the Platform Architect on the individual contributor track. Sprint allocation is owned by the Engineering Director. Your scope is people, and that scope is real and demanding.

Your team spans multiple technical specialisations — real-time systems, robot middleware, motion planning, fleet connectivity — and a range of seniority levels. You do not need to be the expert in every domain your engineers work in. You do need enough technical literacy to understand their work, recognise when someone is genuinely stuck, and have a credible conversation about what a Senior engineer needs to do to become a Staff engineer in their specific field.

• Own every engineer's career trajectory: maintain a live understanding of where each person is, what they are working toward, and what is in the way

• Run trigger-based promotion reviews when evidence is ready — not on annual cycles; assemble review panels, ensure fairness, and advocate for your engineers in cross-team calibration

• Identify and address performance issues early, directly, and with a concrete improvement plan before they become a team problem

• Conduct regular 1:1s focused on the person — project status has its own ceremonies

• Monitor wellbeing; be the person engineers come to when work is hard for non-technical reasons; surface burnout, disengagement, and friction before they compound

• Own hiring end-to-end for open roles: sourcing strategy, interview process design, offer decisions, and the candidate experience; ensure new engineers land well in their first 90 days

• Represent your team's interests and constraints in Director-level planning; surface resourcing problems, morale signals, and structural issues before they become crises

• Partner with the Staff Engineers who provide technical leadership to your team — your job is to ensure the people and team health conditions exist for their technical authority to be effective

• People management experience

  • 3+ years of direct engineering management experience: you have managed at least 6 engineers through hiring, performance management, and career development in a product engineering environment

  • A concrete track record of developing engineers: you can name specific engineers whose careers you advanced and describe what you actually did

  • Experience running performance improvement processes — improving performance where possible, not just ending it

  • Full hiring ownership: you have run the end-to-end hiring cycle for technical roles, not only participated in interviews

• Technical background

  • A software engineering background sufficient for credible technical conversations with robotics engineers: you understand what a control loop is, why real-time constraints matter, and what makes embedded systems hard

  • You do not need to be a robotics specialist — you need enough technical literacy that engineers feel you genuinely understand their work, even if not at the expert level

  • Prior engineering management in embedded systems, robotics, or adjacent hardware-software domains is a strong advantage

• Communication and judgment

  • Clear, direct written and verbal communication in English; able to give hard feedback without it feeling like an attack

  • Sound judgment under ambiguity: you make reasonable decisions with incomplete information and own them

  • Experience holding a team together through the high-pressure periods that come with hardware deadlines — you have been through at least one product launch cycle as a manager

  • Low ego: your success is measured through your engineers' growth and delivery, not your own direct technical contributions

• Organisational sensibility

  • Comfortable operating in an organisation where people management and technical authority are explicitly separated — you partner with Staff Engineers on technical matters without either fully deferring to them or overriding them on decisions that are not yours

  • Clear understanding of the boundary: you own careers, performance, wellbeing, and hiring; architecture and sprint allocation belong elsewhere

• Nice to have

  • Engineering management experience in robotics, autonomous systems, or advanced manufacturing

  • Experience managing engineers across multiple technical specialisations simultaneously
    Experience scaling a team through growth: hiring from 6 to 20+ engineers while maintaining team health

  • German language skills