Senior Engineering Manager

About the role

ABOUT FIRSTPRINCIPLES

FirstPrinciples is building AI to accelerate scientific discovery. Our core product is the Theo Platform, a research environment built to help researchers iterate faster, validate rigorously, and reach verified results they can trust.

We're a fast-growing, remote-first team of builders, researchers, engineers, and thinkers working across Canada, the US, the UK, and expanding globally. What brings us together is a shared curiosity about how the universe works, and a belief that we can build systems that help us explore it more effectively.

We spend our time working on questions that don't have clear answers, like how to design AI that can reason through scientific problems, and how the scientific process as a whole might evolve. This is work that sits somewhere between creativity and rigorous thinking, and often requires comfort with ambiguity and iteration. If you're someone who enjoys tackling big, abstract problems and exploring ideas that don't yet have a defined path forward, you'll likely find the work here interesting.

THE ROLE:

We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team of four to six engineers building core capabilities for Theo and our scientific research platform.

You will develop exceptional engineers, set technical direction, and turn ambitious research ideas into reliable systems. You will operate in a matrixed organization, bringing together specialists from engineering, AI research, physics, simulation, infrastructure, and product into multidisciplinary squads.

A central part of the role is creating a tight feedback loop between research and engineering. You will help researchers and engineers shape solutions together, evolve promising prototypes collaboratively, and preserve scientific insight as experimental systems become robust, scalable products.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone comfortable moving between people development, architecture, execution, and frontier research.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Manage, coach, and develop a team of four to six engineers.

- Form and lead multidisciplinary squads around clear scientific and product outcomes.

- Translate open-ended research goals into technical strategies, milestones, and well-designed systems.

- Partner closely with researchers and physicists from early exploration through implementation and production.

- Create effective paths for researchers to contribute prototypes, algorithms, evaluations, and domain-specific code alongside engineers.

- Help experimental systems mature without losing the ideas and assumptions that made them scientifically valuable.

- Guide architecture, interfaces, technical standards, and major implementation decisions.

- Establish clear ownership and decision-making across teams and reporting lines.

- Balance research velocity with reliability, maintainability, reproducibility, security, and cost.