Remote · Europe or Latin America · Full-time
Engineering Manager
OllyGarden helps engineering teams get reliable OpenTelemetry® data. Our small, senior engineering team builds the platform in Go on Kubernetes, with NATS and ClickHouse, and ships much of its work through AI agents. This role leads day-to-day delivery: turning priorities into commitments, following up, and growing the engineers, while staying hands-on in code review and architecture. You will report to our CEO, Juraci Paixão Kröhling, who keeps product direction. This is a player-coach role, not a VP of Engineering role building a large organization.
What you’ll own
- Turn the CEO’s priorities into a weekly or biweekly plan with explicit commitments and owners
- Follow up daily: unblock engineers, surface risks early, and rebalance work between customer pilots and the roadmap
- Hold regular 1:1s and own feedback and career growth for the engineers on the team
- Own triage, so every urgent issue has an owner, stale work gets closed, and incidents have clear ownership
- Set lightweight engineering norms for code review, design docs on significant decisions, and release discipline
- Drive technical decisions to closure with the engineers who own each area
- Stay hands-on: review code and architecture, and ship code part of the time
Outcomes that matter
- The team commits to a clear plan each cycle and delivers it, and customer delivery dates hold
- Urgent issues always have an owner, and in-progress work reflects what is really happening
- Engineers get regular 1:1s, honest feedback, and a visible path to grow
- Technical decisions get made and recorded instead of staying open, and the CEO gets a short written status every week
- Named milestones, such as starting the next product line, land on schedule
What we’re looking for
- Experience leading delivery for a remote engineering team of roughly 5 to 15 people
- Technical credibility with Go, Kubernetes, streaming systems such as NATS or Kafka, and analytical databases such as ClickHouse, enough to tell when an estimate is unrealistic
- A record of managing senior, autonomous engineers through outcomes rather than process overhead
- Experience with, or strong interest in, AI-assisted engineering: leading teams that ship through agents and setting the quality bar on top of them
- Clear, async-first written communication with a team spread across the Americas and Europe
- Based in Europe or Latin America, with good overlap with Central European working hours
- Comfort reporting to a technical founder who keeps product and architecture direction
Bonus points
- Observability or OpenTelemetry experience
- Experience as a tech lead before moving into management
- Startup or early-stage company experience
- Portuguese language skills
Interview process
Show us how you lead
The process is practical. We want to see how you plan, follow through, give feedback, and judge technical work, not how well you describe a process.
- 01
A conversation about the teams you have led, how you run delivery, and why OllyGarden interests you
- 02
A planning exercise: turn a realistic set of priorities, customer commitments, and open issues into a plan with owners, then walk us through how you would follow up
- 03
A technical session with engineers from the team: walk through a system you helped build, then review a real pull request or design document together, including agent-written code
- 04
Reference conversations focused on delivery, how engineers grew under your leadership, and how you handle difficult feedback