Sr. Engineering Manager
San Francisco, CA - USA
Department:
Job Summary
Additive builds AI-powered tools that give tax professionals superpowers. Tax and accounting is a $600B market with a severe talent shortage and too many manual repetitive workflows. Our systems turn dense often unstructured tax documents into trustworthy structured data and AI-native preparation and review experiences.
The performance of the product we put in the hands of accountants is the most important metric for our team. Outputs must be trustworthy under filing-season deadlines. The cost of being wrong is high: a plausible but incorrect extraction can waste hours of professional review misstate a tax position or flow into a filed return. We use extensive in-house datasets rigorous evaluation suites and deep collaborative customer partnerships to decide what is ready to ship and where to invest next.
As part of Thomson Reuters we pair startup speed and individual ownership with deep tax expertise established customer relationships and a path to rapidly deploy into real tax this environment our team can build quickly learn directly from customers and distribute what works. Today Additive products are used daily at scale by many of the biggest accounting firms in the country.
We are hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to be a hands-on player-coach for one of Additives engineering teams. You will directly manage a team of 4-6 that will grow up to 10-12 engineers primarily at the staff and principal level while remaining an active technical contributor. You will be especially close to the code during your first three to six months as you build context and credibility.
Our engineers own outcomes end to end from understanding a tax professionals workflow to rollout and measurable customer impact. Your role is to raise the technical and product bar develop exceptional engineers and future leaders and help the team move quickly without becoming its decision-making hub. We measure leadership contribution by team output customer impact and talent density not headcount or hierarchy.
Role Snapshot
Level: Senior Engineering Manager; hands-on player-coach
Reports to: Aaron Taylor
Technical surface: Document ingestion and extraction tax-data systems AI-native preparation and review evaluation infrastructure and platform reliability
Location: Downtown San Francisco five days per week
We build through tight collaboration among engineering product tax experts and customers. Working together in person helps us make faster decisions pair on difficult problems coach in the moment and maintain shared context. Additive can cover relocation costs for moving to the San Francisco area.
Build and ship. Contribute directly to technical design implementation debugging testing and release work. Stay fluent in the codebase and step into the highest-leverage technical problems without becoming the teams bottleneck. Guide effective AI-driven development throughout all aspects of the development lifecycle. Choose the pragmatic boring option when that ships reliable value to customers faster.
Develop exceptional engineers. Set clear expectations give direct and personal feedback coach technical and product judgment address performance or interpersonal issues early and help engineers grow into larger leadership roles.
Make evals part of product development. Establish and refine what we measure why it matters and how evaluation signals become release decisions product priorities and durable regression guardrails. Turn production failures and customer feedback into representative test cases datasets and metrics.
Turn strategy into owned outcomes. Define clear finish lines ownership milestones and lightweight operating rhythms. Improve forecasting surface risk early and preserve flexibility in how engineers solve problems.
Stay close to customers and the product. Spend time with tax professionals and customer-facing teams understand their workflows and make sound product calls when there is no product manager in the room.
Grow a high-talent-density team. Own hiring candidate assessment closing onboarding and interviewer calibration. Create an environment where exceptional individual contributors want to work and where adding people follows impact not empire building.
Written meaningful production software within recent years and can still review a design read a pull request debug a difficult issue and hold your own in a technical debate with a senior engineer.
Directly managed experienced engineers while continuing to contribute technically with a track record of improving both individual growth and team output.
Shipped customer-facing eval-driven products and connected engineering decisions to adoption trust revenue or operational outcomes.
Strong product and customer judgment including experience connecting engineering decisions to adoption trust revenue or operational outcomes.
Experience in both operating with startup urgency as well as navigating the stakeholders governance security and dependencies of a larger enterprise.
Helpful not required: Experience with Python TypeScript cloud infrastructure agentic or retrieval-based systems document AI tax technology or enterprise data products.
Championship-winning mindset: Were here to build something incredible - and we do what it takes to achieve this. Outstanding performance is the expectation.
Team First: Were low-ego. Our pride comes from the team and mission succeeding.
Tenacious: Were willing to do hard unglamorous tasks and stick through tough times.
Accountant Obsessed: Additive exists to 10x accountants. We all interact directly with accountants on a regular basis to understand and improve their world.
Genuine Fun: Were having fun. Its a grand adventure together and were going to surmount never before seen challenges with wonderful teammates.
At Additive we value diversity and are committed to an inclusive workplace. Additive is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race color religion sex sexual orientation gender gender identity national origin disability protected veteran status or any other characteristic under federal state or local law. If you require an accommodation during the job application process please notify for support.
Required Experience:
Manager