Senior Engineering Manager (AI Product, Thunderbolt)

Join MZLA, the team behind Thunderbird, one of the world's most trusted open-source email applications. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead engineering execution, people management, and operating practices for Thunderbolt, an open-source AI product initiative. You will manage a senior engineering team, stay closely engaged with the codebase, and help the team deliver a reliable, enterprise-ready open-source AI product. This is a full-time, fully remote position with a range of benefits including health and wellness coverage, mental health support, time away, parental leave, financial benefits, learning and development opportunities, and more.

• Lead engineering execution by clarifying priorities, ownership, timelines, risks, dependencies, and quality expectations.
• Manage engineers and contractors, including coaching, feedback, prioritization, performance support, and team development.
• Stay close to the codebase by contributing code, reviewing technical work, evaluating tradeoffs, and helping the team maintain momentum and quality.
• Demonstrated experience delivering complex applications across multiple platforms, such as desktop, web, and mobile, using technologies such as Tauri, Electron, React Native, or comparable frameworks
• A track record of leading a team that shipped polished, top-tier products held to a genuine standard of craft
• Technical fluency with AI-enabled products, including the ability to evaluate tradeoffs across areas such as LLM applications, RAG workflows, agents, enterprise search, automation, on-device AI, or AI evaluation
• Strong ability to translate ambiguous product and technical direction into clear plans, ownership models, and delivery momentum
• Excellent communication skills around technical prioritization, release risk, ownership, quality expectations, and tradeoffs
• 15+ years of professional software development experience, including significant experience in senior engineering leadership or complex product delivery roles
• 5+ years of experience managing technical teams, including senior engineers or senior individual contributors
• Experience with enterprise software, regulated environments, or similarly complex technical products, including security, privacy, compliance readiness, administration, integrations, and customer-controlled deployment models
• Practical experience with local-first, offline-capable, self-hosted, hybrid, on-premise, air-gapped, or other customer-controlled product architectures, including tradeoffs related to data storage, sync, privacy, reliability, and user experience
• Experience improving engineering practices related to technical planning, code review, release readiness, testing, documentation, CI/CD, maintainability, or technical debt management
• Experience with compliance or security standards such as SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, or similar frameworks
• Strong communication and documentation skills are essential for effective collaboration across time zones and disciplines
• Experience helping take a product from zero to one in a startup or new product initiative
• Experience working in open-source or maintainer-style engineering environments
• Applicants must reside in and have permanent work authorization for the country location(s) specified in the posting