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.

What you’ll own

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 we’re building

A ground-up rebuild of the annotation editor, with interfaces generated by coding agents instead of hand-configured.

Native evaluation of agent trajectories: trace ingestion, replay, and hybrid human-plus-model-judge workflows.

Continuous calibration: treating automated evaluators as instruments that can drift and need ongoing checks against human ground truth.

The workforce platform behind our managed services business.

Quality analytics across annotators, models, and programs.

Our own services team uses the platform to deliver customer work. You’ll see directly where the software helps, where it falls short, and which problems keep coming back. Part of the opportunity is turning that experience into better products, not just a growing list of one-off customer fixes.

Stack

Python/Django, TypeScript/React, Postgres, Kubernetes. Coding agents are part of how we work every day.

What success looks like

Engineers take greater ownership and need less intervention. Scope and delivery risks surface early, rather than at the deadline. Cus