The opportunity
Thunderbolt is an open-source, cross-platform AI product initiative from the team behind Thunderbird. It is being built around a clear principle: people and organizations should be able to use AI while staying in control of their data, infrastructure, model choices, and long-term options. Thunderbolt is designed to support flexible deployment models, integrations with AI tools and workflows, and use cases across desktop, web, and mobile.
We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead engineering execution, people management, and operating practices for Thunderbolt as it moves from R&D incubation into a more mature product and enterprise development phase. This role will help the team define what production-ready means at this stage: stronger release discipline, clearer ownership, higher user-facing product quality, stronger engineering practices, and a more scalable operating model.
This is a hands-on technical management role. The Senior Engineering Manager will manage a senior engineering team, stay closely engaged with the codebase and technical execution, coordinate work across employees, contractors, and technical partners, and help the team deliver a reliable, enterprise-ready open-source AI product.
What you’ll do
- 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.
- Partner with technical and product leadership to turn product direction, AI strategy, user experience goals, and technical priorities into coordinated engineering plans.
- Establish planning, review, release, and follow-through practices that improve predictability and reduce bottlenecks.
- Maintain high standards for code quality, testing, documentation, reliability, security awareness, maintainability, and release readiness.
- Build strong product and architectural context across AI-enabled workflows, integrations, local-first or customer-controlled architectures, and release requirements.
- Lead hiring, onboarding, and resource planning as the Thunderbolt engineering team grows.
What you bring
- 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.
- Technical fluency with AI-enabled products, including the ability to evaluate tradeoffs across areas such as LLM applications, RAG workflows, agents, or on-device AI.
- Demonstrated experience delivering complex applications across multiple platforms, such as desktop, web, and mobile, using technologies such as Tauri, Electron, or React Native.
- Experience with enterprise software, regulated environments, or similarly complex technical products, including security, privacy, and compliance readiness.
- Practical experience with local-first, offline-capable, self-hosted, or hybrid product architectures.