Life at Plume
At Plume, we believe that technology isn't about moving faster, it's about making life’s moments better. Which is why we’ve built the world's first, and only, open and hardware-independent service delivery platform for smart homes, small businesses, enterprises, and beyond. Our SaaS platform uses WiFi, advanced AI, and machine learning to create the future of connected spaces—and human experiences—at massive scale.
We now deliver services to over 60 million locations globally and have managed over 3 billion devices on our platform. We’re expanding rapidly, pioneering a new category, and we achieved our Series F funding in just four years. Our customers include many of the world's largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who look to Plume to help them evolve their smart home offerings while gleaning insights from their own data.
With a bias for action and a love for being trailblazers, the team at Plume embodies a combination of relentless curiosity and imaginative innovation. We challenge ourselves to think in ways that other companies don't, work to do what should be done (rather than what can), and if we can’t do it exceptionally well, we don’t do it. It’s how we've assembled a team of world-class builders, thinkers, and doers. And it’s how we’re reinventing what’s possible every day.
This is a work-from-office / In-Office role based in our Hyderabad, India location.
About the team
Core Engineering builds the firmware and cloud platform that Plume's next-generation architecture is built on. We deliver the Plume Firmware Agent (PFA) across three reference platforms — RDK-B, prplOS / prplMesh, and OpenWRT / OpenSync — The highly scalable cloud core manages a fleet of connected devices over standards-based protocols.
About the role
We're hiring an Engineering Manager to lead one of Core Engineering's delivery teams. This is a hands-on-adjacent people-leadership role: you own the health, growth and output of a team of roughly 10-30 firmware, backend and QA engineers, and you are close enough to the technology to make real calls on scope, sequencing and trade-offs.
You will not be the only voice in the room. Core runs with technical leads, TPMs, product owners and QA leads across multiple regions, and the manager who succeeds here is the one who makes that distributed system work.
What you'll do:
Lead the team
- Manage, coach and grow a globally distributed team of firmware, cloud and QA engineers; run 1:1s, career development, performance and compensation cycles.
- Own hiring for your team end to end — sourcing partnership, interview loop design, closing, and onboarding that gets new engineers productive on a complex embedded + cloud stack.
- Build a culture where code review, design review and demos are collaborative rather than transactional — our review norms deliberately keep PRs open for cross-region input, and that only works if managers protect it.
Own delivery
- Drive sprint planning, review, demo and retrospective for your team on the CORE board; keep the backlog groomed, parented and honestly estimated.
- Take quarterly product requirements through grooming into epics and stories, in partnership with Product Management, Product Owners and the TPM — and push back early when scope, dependencies or capacity don't add up.
- Own release readiness for your area across Alpha, Beta and GA: entry/exit criteria, blocker triage, validation coverage, and a clear-eyed status your leadership can act on.
- Track and unblock cross-team dependencies with Product Engineering, Integration Engineering, Cloud/CSS, DevOps and InfoSec.
Own technical direction with your leads
- Partner with technical leads and architects on platform strategy — the move from a stateful, driver-coupled OpenSync design toward stateless, standards-compliant, SDK-conformant operation over USP.
- Make and defend architectural trade-offs across three device platforms and the cloud services above them, including what gets upstreamed versus carried downstream.
- Raise the engineering bar on the things that quietly decide velocity: build times, branch hygiene, test automation, flaky testbeds, and observability.
What we're looking for:
Leadership Skills
- 13+ years in software engineering with 3+ years managing engineers directly, including hiring and performance management.
- Strong technical grounding in embedded Linux networking — Wi-Fi/networking firmware, an embedded build system (Yocto/OpenWrt/OpenEmbedded), C, and debugging on real hardware — or in distributed cloud services with genuine fluency in the device side.
- Demonstrated ownership of a release train: you have shipped firmware or platform software into production at scale; with QA and release gates you were accountable for.
- Experience leading a distributed team across time zones, and the operating discipline that requires — written communication, asynchronous decision-making, and deliberate inclusion of remote colleagues.
- Comfort operating in a matrixed organisation with technical leads, TPMs and product owners you influence but don't manage.
Technical Skills
- Direct experience with one or more of RDK-B, prplOS/prplMesh, or OpenSync/OpenWrt.
- Working knowledge of Broadband Forum TR-369 (USP) and TR-181, and/or Wi-Fi Alliance EasyMesh.
- Background in the CPE / broadband gateway ecosystem — ODM and chipset vendor SDKs, operator certification, interop testing.
- Familiarity with the surrounding toolchain: Jenkins, GitHub-based workflows, Artifactory, containerised services, Kubernetes/EKS, MQTT, PKI and certificate management.
- Experience with test automation for embedded systems (e.g. Boardfarm, TDK, cloudless test harnesses) and with managing QA as a first-class discipline rather than an afterthought.
- Exposure to Wi-Fi 6/6E/7, MLO, and mesh performance work.
About Plume
As the creator of the only open, hardware-independent, cloud-controlled experience platform for ISPs and their subscribers, Plume partners with over 400 ISP customers, including some of the world’s largest such as Charter, Liberty Global, and J:COM.
Using OpenSync, the most widely supported open-source, silicon-to-cloud framework for smart spaces, Plume’s software-defined network allows ISPs to decouple their service offerings from hardware and rapidly curate and deliver new services over a multi-vendor, open-platform architecture.
Plume is an equal opportunity workplace that maintains a continuing policy of nondiscrimination in all employment practices and decisions, ensuring equal employment opportunities for all qualified individuals without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, pregnancy, childbirth or related individual conditions, medical conditions (as defined by state law), military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law.
Skills Required
- 13+ years of software engineering experience
- 3+ years managing engineers directly
- Experience with hiring and performance management
- Strong technical grounding in embedded Linux networking or distributed cloud services with device-side fluency
- Experience with Wi-Fi or networking firmware, an embedded build system, C, and debugging on real hardware
- Demonstrated ownership of a release train and production software shipped at scale
- Experience with QA and release gates
- Experience leading distributed teams across time zones
- Experience operating in a matrixed organization with technical leads, TPMs, and product owners
- Direct experience with RDK-B, prplOS/prplMesh, or OpenSync/OpenWrt
- Working knowledge of Broadband Forum TR-369 USP, TR-181, or Wi-Fi Alliance EasyMesh
- Background in the CPE or broadband gateway ecosystem, including ODMs, chipset SDKs, operator certification, or interoperability testing
- Familiarity with Jenkins, GitHub workflows, Artifactory, containerized services, Kubernetes/EKS, MQTT, PKI, and certificate management
- Experience with embedded-systems test automation and managing QA as a first-class discipline
- Exposure to Wi-Fi 6/6E/7, MLO, and mesh performance work
What We Do
The world’s first SaaS experience platform for Communications Service Providers. At Plume, we believe that technology isn't about moving faster. It's about making moments better. Which is why we've brought relentless focus to understanding the digital lifestyles people want to live, the spaces where they play out, and innovating ways to make digital experiences blossom. As the only open and hardware-independent solution, Plume enables the rapid delivery of new services for connected homes, small business, and beyond at massive scale. For residential subscribers, Plume delivers self-optimizing WiFi, cyber-security, access controls, and more. Our purpose-built suite of smart services turns small business networks into fully connected, business intelligence platforms. And Service Providers get robust back-end applications for unprecedented visibility and support. Our goal is simple: to keep you in the flow with any experiences you turn on. And to help you fill the spaces that matter to you with all kinds of wonderful. With a bias for action and love for breaking molds, the team at Plume embodies a combination of relentless curiosity and imaginative innovation. We constantly challenge ourselves to think in ways that other companies don't, and work to do what should be done (rather than what can). It’s how we've assembled a team of world-class engineers, thinkers, and doers. And it’s how we’re reinventing what’s possible every day. We believe that the core competitive advantage in the over-the-top era resides in the ability to create new services at high cadence, deploy them at massive scale, and to orchestrate through a common data set. Our flexible, cloud-controlled platform paired with an open-source software stack decouples service creation and delivery from dependence on proprietary hardware.
