Engineering Manager
Engineering Manager
Location: Redwood City, CA (On-Site) • Full-Time
About Hammerhead
We're unleashing AI with intelligent orchestration while addressing one of the most pressing bottlenecks for AI: access to power. Our cutting-edge platform optimizes data center power infrastructure to maximize AI workload throughput within existing electrical limits, without requiring new power plants or grid expansions.
Our platform uses reinforcement learning to intelligently orchestrate power, cooling, and compute in real time, enabling data centers to run significantly more AI workloads within their existing electrical and thermal limits. Our team, at AutoGrid, had optimized over 8 gigawatts of mission-critical power globally. At Hammerhead, we're addressing a $64 billion-per-year market opportunity while dramatically reducing the environmental footprint of AI infrastructure.
About the Role
We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead and grow our core engineering organization. You will manage a high-caliber team of engineers building Hammerhead's AI-driven power orchestration platform, spanning simulation, reinforcement learning, real-time control systems, and data infrastructure.
This is a player-coach role. You will be deeply engaged in technical strategy and architecture while directly managing engineers, driving execution, and building the culture and processes that allow the team to scale. You will partner closely with the CTO on roadmap prioritization, hiring, and organizational design.
You will report to the CTO.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 4–10 engineers across simulation, RL, and platform infrastructure, setting a high bar for technical quality, reliability, and velocity.
- Drive sprint planning, roadmap execution, and quarterly goal-setting in close collaboration with the CTO and product leads.
- Own engineering delivery: ensure features ship on time, technical debt is managed proactively, and incidents are resolved with clear post-mortems and follow-through.
- Recruit and hire exceptional engineers: own the full funnel from sourcing through offer, and build a team that reflects Hammerhead's technical ambition.
- Run effective engineering rituals: standups, design reviews, retrospectives, and 1:1s that keep the team focused, aligned, and unblocked.
- Define and enforce engineering standards: code review practices, CI/CD discipline, testing coverage, documentation, and on-call readiness.
- Act as a technical escalation point: dig into architecture decisions, system design tradeoffs, and production issues alongside your team.
- Partner with the CTO to shape Hammerhead's technical roadmap, evaluate build vs. buy decisions, and drive adoption of emerging tools and frameworks.
- Represent engineering in cross-functional discussions with operations, product, and go-to-market teams.
Qualifications
Required:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 2 years in an engineering management or technical lead role with direct people management responsibility.
- Hands-on engineering background in Python, Golang or similar systems-oriented languages.
- Experience leading teams working on real-time systems, simulation, ML/RL infrastructure, or high-throughput data pipelines in production environments.
- Track record of hiring and developing strong engineers.
- Strong execution instincts: you break ambiguous problems into milestones, manage tradeoffs transparently, and ship without cutting corners on quality.
- Clear, direct communicator. You write well, run efficient meetings, and surface blockers before they become crises.
- Comfortable operating in an early-stage environment.
Preferred:
- Experience at a startup or high-growth infrastructure or ML/AI company.
- Familiarity with reinforcement learning systems, simulation environments, or power/energy infrastructure software.
- Experience managing distributed teams or teams with mixed research and engineering profiles.
- Background in or exposure to data center operations, industrial IoT, or energy management systems.