Engineering Manager - Core Infra

About the role

ABOUT CINDER

Cinder is the mission-critical infrastructure that keeps the world's most important digital platforms true to what they stand for. The internet has always been abused by bad actors, and AI is making it exponentially worse, driving fraud, abuse, and manipulation at a scale and speed no human team can fight alone. Cinder gives platforms one command center to fight back: to write and enforce policy, deploy AI agents against abuse in real time, investigate threats, file NCMEC reports, and prove their safety programs are working.

Our customers are some of the largest internet platforms in the world. The decisions made in our software directly determine what stays up, what comes down, and how users are treated.

We're a small, fast-moving team backed by Accel and Y Combinator. We care about being intentional, direct, and deeply focused on solving real customer problems.

WHY THIS ROLE

Cinder’s Core Infrastructure team builds the platform and infrastructure that judges the safety of much of the user-generated content on the internet. This journey requires extreme focus and ruthless prioritization. As Cinder has grown, Core Infra has become responsible for the critical pieces that underpin workstreams across the product, without a dedicated leader to organize that work. We have a small, senior team doing high-leverage work, and we need a capable people manager to ensure that effort is aimed at the right things, coordinated cleanly with the rest of the company, and never wasted on collisions or unclear ownership.

This is a people and coordination role at its core. Your job is to take a group of strong, self-directed engineers and make sure they're working on the most important things, that those priorities are clear, and that the rest of the company knows how to work with the team. You'll need enough technical depth to earn the respect of senior engineers and hold your own in architecture discussions; the team is strong enough to largely run its own execution. You'll report to our Head of Engineering and have real influence on how we build out engineering leadership as the org scales.

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

You'll own the health, direction, and delivery of the Core Infra team. The team owns the systems the rest of engineering builds on, including the graph service, CI/CD, and core developer tooling. It's a small team that leans senior, and its work is a genuine competitive advantage for Cinder. In practice that means:

- Setting clear priorities and a roadmap your team understands. Engineers should know what they're working on, why it matters to the business, and what we're choosing not to do. You'll bring the business context behind the work and translate it into focused execution.

- Owning the interface between Core Infra and the rest of the company. You'll be the clear point of contact for other teams, run the intake process for work coming into Core Infra, and make sure requests are triaged, routed, and prioritized transparently rather than landing through back-channels. You’ll be the default liaison to GTM, FDE, CX and other cross-functional partners, and pick up technical work alongside your team when it helps, without becoming a blocker.