Senior Engineering Manager

About HumanSignal

Real-world data is the competitive edge in AI.

HumanSignal is a human data partner for companies building AI models and products. Our customers ship better AI, faster, because we partner with their researchers from real-world data creation to annotation to delivery.

We design and create datasets from scratch, recruit and manage the domain experts who evaluate model output, and run everything through our own platform, Label Studio, the open-source standard for data labeling and evaluation, used by over 1 million practitioners worldwide.

We specialize in the operationally complex: real-world data collection, multimodal pipelines, and multi-step workflows. Advanced ML and AI teams use our enterprise platform to run their own data factories, and our services team to extend their reach where in-house capacity runs out.

If you want to do work that materially shapes how the next generation of AI products gets built, we'd love to talk.

The engineers on our team are great. We want to make sure they have a manager who makes them better, and that’s the role.

We’re building across an open-source platform, enterprise software, and a managed data-services business that runs on our own product. We need to make delivery more predictable while giving engineers more ownership – not add another layer of approvals. You’ll help shape what we build, the commitments we make, and how the team works.

You manage the team directly: 1:1s, feedback, performance, promotions, and the hard conversations. You own delivery so that what we decide to build turns into shipped software on a rhythm we can count on. You notice when someone is blocked and help them get unstuck without making yourself the dependency for every decision. When someone is struggling, you address it early.

The part of this role we care about most is helping people become better professionals: better at scoping, estimating, making decisions, and owning outcomes rather than tasks. If your instinct when an engineer struggles is to take the work back, this isn’t the role. If your instinct is to figure out what they’re missing and help them develop it, keep reading.

You still write and ship code. Not because we need another full-time individual contributor, but because I don’t believe you can effectively manage this team if you’ve stopped building. You stay hands-on to make better technical decisions, work through difficult problems, and improve how the team builds. Your job is not to become the team’s busiest engineer or the person every release depends on.

You use coding agents in real work and understand where they help, where they fail, and how to verify their output. You make the team better by showing what works and helping people apply it – not by mandating tools or mistaking more generated code for better engineering. You can challenge architectural decisions, explain the tradeoffs, and help the team choose an approach it can ship and maintain.
What you’ll own

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Delivery: Planning, scoping, and shipping quality software against a roadmap you help shape. You make tradeoffs explicit and push back when we’re asking the team to do more than it can do well.

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How the team works: Enough structure to make delivery predictable, not so much that it slows a small team down. You remove friction, address recurring blockers, and improve how we use AI tooling.

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People: Hiring, clear expectations, regular feedback, growth, promotions, and exits when they’re necessary.

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Technical judgment: Staying close enough to the code and architecture to challenge decisions and support engineers without becoming the approval gate for everything.

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The engineering response to escalations: Getting the right people involved, making priority calls, and addressing recurring causes across customer, services-team, and open-source issues. You’re accountable for the response, not expected to personally fix every problem.

What we’re building

- A ground-up rebuild of the ann