About Cerby
At Cerby, security is everyone's business.
Cerby extends your security perimeter to include your disconnected applications, providing identity automation and eliminating manual processes. It's one of the biggest blind spots in enterprise security, and we're the team closing it. If you want to work alongside the team solving one of the hardest, most overlooked problems in security, you're in the right place.
Founded in 2020, Cerby is backed by leading investors and trusted by enterprises across the globe.
About the role
The Engineering Manager is responsible for the people, culture, and delivery of the engineering squad. You are the primary owner of team performance, career development, hiring, and organizational health—the conditions that allow great engineering to happen. This engineering squad is responsible for critical parts of the Cerby platform, including the orchestration and runtime of automation workflows, and the developer SDK for building them.
You will collaborate closely with your squad, engineering leadership, and cross-functional partners in product, design, and people to drive high-impact initiatives while building a strong, high-performing engineering culture.
As Cerby scales its engineering organization and embraces AI-assisted development, you will create the right environment—time, resources, and psychological safety—for your team to experiment with and adopt modern development practices that increase quality and velocity.
What you'll do
People Leadership & Career Development
- Manage a squad of engineers through regular 1:1s, structured feedback, and individualized growth plans.
- Own performance management end-to-end: set clear expectations, deliver honest and timely feedback, run performance reviews, and address underperformance proactively.
- Partner with engineers on career pathing—helping ICs grow toward senior, staff, or leadership roles based on their goals and the company’s needs.
- Identify and close skill gaps through targeted development opportunities: training, mentorship, stretch projects, and learning programs.
- Build and maintain psychological safety within the team—an environment where engineers speak up, take ownership, and learn from failure without fear.
Hiring & Retention
- Lead engineering hiring for your squad: define role requirements, partner with people, conduct structured interviews, and make hiring decisions.
- Build a compelling candidate experience that reflects Cerby’s engineering culture and mission.
- Proactively manage retention risk by understanding what motivates each team member and addressing concerns before they become attrition.
- Partner with People on leveling, equity, and comp decisions to stay competitive in a tight talent market.
Delivery & Operational Excellence
- Own delivery predictability and team velocity: ensure the squad ships consistently against committed OKRs and sprint goals.
- Optimize team rituals—standups, sprint planning, retrospectives—for efficiency, clarity, and continuous improvement.
- Communicate team status, risks, and dependencies clearly and proactively to engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Remove organizational blockers—cross-team dependencies, process friction, resource constraints—so engineers can focus on delivery.
- Define and track team OKRs aligned with company and product goals, and report on progress with transparency.
- Enable your team to integrate AI-assisted development practices—code generation, intelligent code review, automated testing—by protecting capacity and creating space for adoption.
Stakeholder & Cross-functional Collaboration
- Serve as the primary point of contact for engineering leadership and cross-functional partners on people and delivery topics.
- Collaborate with Product Managers to ensure the squad has the capacity, context, and clarity needed to deliver on roadmap commitments.
- Partner with other Engineering Managers to drive consistency in people practices, career frameworks, and engineering culture across teams.
- Communicate status, risks, and needs to engineering and company leadership with clarity and appropriate urgency.
- Embody and promote Cerby’s values—transparency, ownership, security-first mindset—within and beyond your team.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong enough technical foundation to earn credibility with senior engineers.
- 2+ years of engineering management experience, ideally in a high-growth or scaling environment (Series A–C preferred).
- Demonstrated track record of growing engineers—promotions, career moves, skill development—not just shipping product.
- Experience managing performance: supporting high performers and handling underperformance with clarity and care.
- Strong hiring instincts: experience building interview pipelines, evaluating candidates, and closing competitive offers.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills—able to represent the team upward and across the organization.
- Comfortable working with ambiguity and making sound people decisions without perfect information.
- Experience with agile development methodologies and a pragmatic approach to process.
- BS or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to Have
- Background in cybersecurity, identity and access management, or related security domains.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development tooling (e.g., Claude, GitHub Copilot) and how it changes team workflows.
- Experience managing teams building security-critical or compliance-sensitive systems.
- Track record of scaling engineering teams from early-stage to growth—hiring multiple engineers, shaping org structure.
- Experience with leveling frameworks and compensation benchmarking in competitive engineering talent markets.
- Experience mentoring engineers transitioning into senior or staff roles.
