Engineering Manager, Calc Engine — Superhuman Docs

About the role

Superhuman offers a dynamic hybrid working model for this role. This flexible approach gives team members the best of both worlds: plenty of focus time along with in-person collaboration that helps foster trust, innovation, and a strong team culture.

ABOUT SUPERHUMAN

Grammarly is now part of Superhuman, the AI productivity platform on a mission to unlock the superhuman potential in everyone. The Superhuman suite of apps and agents brings AI wherever people work, integrating with over 1 million applications and websites. The company’s products include Grammarly’s writing assistance, Superhuman Docs’s collaborative workspaces, Mail’s inbox management, and Go, the proactive AI assistant that understands context and delivers help automatically. Founded in 2009, Superhuman empowers over 40 million people, 50,000 organizations, and 3,000 educational institutions worldwide to eliminate busywork and focus on what matters. Learn more at superhuman.com http://superhuman.com and about our values here https://blog.superhuman.com/our-values/.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Superhuman Docs' tables started as a custom, in-memory database designed to run in a browser tab. Our customers have pushed it beyond its limits, and as a result we’re making big changes to our storage and calc engine.

This team owns the full vertical: the formula language and its grammar, the AST parser, the execution planner that determines what to compute and when, execution optimization that keeps millions of concurrent user applications responsive, and the performance infrastructure that makes it all work under real-world load. You’ll lead the small team building it while staying hands-on in the code yourself.

The hard part is building a database building block for non-technical users who are converting their rituals & processes into production software. This means we have to deliver a product that’s cost-sensitive, enterprise-grade, and never predictably accessed.

WHAT YOU’LL OWN

- Invalidation, execution, and query planning for the calc engine

- Architectural decisions to scale the infrastructure as usage and document complexity grow

- Technical direction alongside a small team (~5 engineers) — reviewing code and designs, giving fast feedback, and still writing code yourself

- Performance: profiling, benchmarking, and closing the gap between “correct” and “fast” at scale

- Coordination with the teams building on top of the calc engine

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

- You’ve worked on the internals of a database system — query optimization, query planning, SQL execution, storage-engine internals (B-Trees, LSM Trees, etc.), or HTAP (hybrid transactional/analytical processing) systems. You don’t need to have built one from scratch; owning a piece of one (a query or storage engine inside a larger system) counts.

- 2-3+ years as an EM or tech lead managing a small team (~5), staying close to the code. This is a player-coach role — roughly half management, half hands-on — not a step away from engineering.