Sr. Engineering Manager - Pendo for Agents

The Pendo for Agents team builds Pendo's AI and agent product area, a large greenfield surface where much of the architecture is being defined as the team builds. This team operates at the center of a fast-moving product space where engineering decisions shape both the customer experience and the technical foundation for future scale. As Senior Manager, Engineering, you will own technical direction for Pendo for Agents end to end and be fully accountable for delivery, engineering quality, and the talent pipeline. You will partner closely with Product, Design, Staff and Principal engineers, and adjacent Engineering leaders to make high-quality architecture decisions, guide execution, and grow a team that can move quickly without over-building. This role is based in our New York City office.

Responsibilities

Team leadership: Lead, coach, and manage a team of approximately four engineers today, with the role growing into ownership of two teams as the product area scales; Architecture ownership: Own the technical direction for the Pendo for Agents architecture end to end; Delivery execution: Guide prioritization, planning, and execution across the team while maintaining a healthy delivery cadence; Cross-functional partnership: Partner with Product and Design to deliver high-quality features using Agile development practices; Player-coach technical leadership: Stay hands-on in architecture and technical problem-solving while spending the majority of your time coaching, unblocking, and growing the team; AI-enabled operations: Use AI tools to accelerate engineering operations, including retro synthesis, incident pattern analysis, documentation, and onboarding; Hiring and talent planning: Own headcount planning within the team and partner with recruiting on sourcing, interview calibration, offer decisions, and closing candidates; Team culture: Create a healthy team culture that promotes ownership, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.

Requirements

5+ years of engineering experience, including at least 2 years in a direct people-management role, with a track record of growing engineers as well as delivering software; Hands-on architecture experience with LLM or agent systems, including RAG, tool-calling, or orchestration frameworks, with the ability to own architecture rather than only review it; Experience delivering in greenfield or early-stage product areas where architecture and patterns are still being defined; Demonstrated ability to manage delivery commitments across a team of engineers, including ownership of sprint or quarterly planning processes; Strong build-versus-buy judgment in a fast-moving AI tooling landscape; Strong technical foundation in front-end or back-end development, such as React, Angular, Vue, Go, Python, Java, Ruby, or C#; Demonstrated success working cross-functionally across Engineering, Product, and Design, with the ability to surface constraints early and maintain trust under pressure; Experience hiring for technical roles, including calibrating interview panels, making offer decisions, and closing candidates.

Nice to have

Experience building or maintaining cloud-native applications; Experience shipping a 0-to-1 AI or agent product, or leading a team that did, including customer-support agents, copilots, or autonomous or agentic systems; Hands-on experience with modern AI, LLM, and agent tooling, with the ability to evaluate new tools critically and bring that fluency to the team; Experience leading engineers who use AI-powered developer tools such as Copilot or Cursor to improve productivity, code quality, or onboarding speed.

Benefits

Employer-heavy coverage; $0 premium options; Strong 401(k) match; Equity; Flexible time off