Manager, Software Engineering, Server at Airlock Digital in California, United States

Job description

• We are looking for a hands-on engineering manager to lead the Airlock Digital Server team. You will own the technical direction of a mature security product and the performance, growth, and health of the team, while giving engineers clear ownership and decision-making authority.
• Airlock Digital Server is at the center of our application-control platform. It supports policy and allowlisting workflows, communication with endpoint agents, execution data, reporting, enterprise authentication, integrations, administration, and large-scale customer deployments.

Responsibilities

• Set the Airlock Digital Server's technical direction and turn product, security, and customer priorities into executable plans. Guide decisions about architecture, data integrity, system boundaries, asynchronous processing, external interfaces, authorization, performance, failure behavior, and backward compatibility.
• Lead and develop a group of engineers across countries and career levels. Create an accountable, psychologically safe team through clear expectations, effective one-on-ones, candid feedback, career development, and support for hiring and onboarding.
• Stay hands-on where it matters most through design and code reviews, critical implementation, complex debugging, incident response, and high-risk delivery decisions.
• Evolve a mature codebase while balancing delivery with security, reliability, performance, maintainability, testability, and focused technical-debt reduction. Ensure deployments, migrations, upgrades, and rollbacks are safe in customer-managed environments.
• Improve execution through clear priorities, realistic plans, early risk management, and consistent follow-through. Strengthen documentation, testing, delivery automation, observability, secure development, release readiness, production support, and responsible use of AI-assisted tools.
• Lead challenging customer and production investigations across the application, data, background processing, integrations, upgrades, deployment environments, and server-agent interactions. Turn recurring failures into lasting improvements.
• Partner with product management, QA, SRE, DevOps, security, support, cloud engineering, and endpoint teams to coordinate delivery, resolve dependencies, and improve customer outcomes.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience designing, building, shipping, and sustaining complex server-side or enterprise software, with hands-on expertise in architecture, APIs, data access, background processing, automated testing, performance, and major upgrades.
• Experience leading a mature product spanning multiple services, interfaces, data stores, and operational components, with a commitment to continuous learning and the ability to help the team grow and adapt as technologies and needs change. This includes improving testing, delivery automation, observability, and technical-debt management while continuing to deliver product improvements.
• Strong knowledge of data modeling, indexing, query performance, migrations, data integrity, and high-volume operational data, plus asynchronous processing concepts such as concurrency, retries, idempotency, throughput, and recovery.
• A record of building secure enterprise applications, with sound judgment about authentication, authorization, role-based access control, session management, encryption, secrets, input validation, API security, auditability, and sensitive customer data.
• At least three years managing a small software engineering team, including coaching engineers at different career levels, delegation, performance feedback, career development, difficult conversations, hiring, and team health.
• Principal-level technical leadership experience setting durable direction, resolving architectural tradeoffs, mentoring senior engineers, influencing beyond the immediate team, and aligning technical decisions with business and customer needs.
• Clear written and verbal communication, sound judgment, and experience leading distributed teams. You can document decisions, explain technical tradeoffs, communicate risks early, and build alignment across engineering, product, customer-facing teams, and time zones.
• A bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field is preferred but not required. Equivalent practical experience is welcome.
• Professional experience with Ruby and Ruby on Rails in a mature server-side application, including supporting technologies such as Puma, Passenger, Jbuilder, Rack middleware, server-rendered views, JavaScript, or Tailwind CSS.
• Experience developing Go services, command-line utilities, data-processing tools, or performance-sensitive components.
• Experience with MongoDB or another document database, plus Redis or a background-job framework such as Resque.
• Experience operating Linux applications and working with Docker or Podman, container images, system services, Nginx, shell scripting, RPM or DEB packaging, and appliance-style distribution.
• Experience with application control, allowlisting, endpoint protection, EDR, anti-malware, software trust, application reputation, or another security product where secure failure behavior, auditability, reliability, and careful change management matter.
• Familiarity with enterprise identity technologies such as SAML, LDAP, OAuth 2.0, Microsoft Entra ID, and Google authentication, plus secure APIs, webhooks, SIEM, and integrations with platforms such as Microsoft Graph, Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, or Microsoft Teams.
• Experience with high-volume data ingestion, search, reporting, retention, backup and restore, or performance tuning for deployments supporting tens of thousands of endpoints, and with modernizing a long-lived codebase while continuing to serve customers.

Skills

Required

• Clear written and verbal communication
• Sound judgment
• Experience leading distributed teams
• Commitment to continuous learning
• Ability to help the team grow and adapt
• Candid feedback
• Psychologically safe team creation
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• Puma
• Passenger
• Jbuilder

Benefits

• We don’t think money is everything, but we know it is an important part of your decision to apply for a role. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include responsibilities of the job, education, location, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and internal equity, alignment with market data, or applicable laws.
• At Airlock Digital we offer a wide range of benefits to our eligible team members. Our benefit programs vary by location and can include Medical, dental, and vision insurance – 401K Plan with 4% Company Match – Life and Disability Programs – Paid Parental Leave - Paid time off and Paid Holidays – Volunteer and Birthday Time off – Home Office Allowance