Engineering Manager
A people manager for engineers, owning performance, growth, hiring, and team health.
Engineering managers run people, not architecture. They sit between the engineers and the rest of the company: they translate strategy into team-level priorities, they own the hiring loop, they handle the conversations no engineer wants to have. The technical decisions stay with the tech lead; the EM makes sure the people making those decisions are growing, supported, and not about to quit.
A good EM has technical credibility (engineers respect them) without competing with the team’s senior ICs. A bad one is either too disconnected to lead or too in-the-weeds to manage. The role is one of the hardest to hire for; most early-stage startups overhire on the technical side and underhire on the management side, which is why teams of eight start to wobble.
Worked example: a team grows from five to ten engineers in a year. Nobody added management, so the founding CTO is now running ten 1:1s, three hiring loops, and two performance problems while still trying to own architecture. Velocity craters, two people leave, and everyone blames “process”. The actual cause is a missing EM. The signal arrives months before the attrition: the most senior person spends more time in meetings about people than in the codebase or the SDLC.
The common mistake is promoting a strong senior engineer into the role with no training and assuming the people skills will follow the technical ones. They usually do not; the two skill sets are close to independent. Promote for demonstrated interest in the people work, then teach the technical context, not the other way around.
The honest trade-off: a great EM makes the team’s output less legible to the founder, because their best work (retention, unblocking, hard conversations) does not show up on a Gantt chart. Founders who measure only shipped features tend to under-value and under-hire the role until the wobble becomes attrition.
Related: Fractional CTO Austria.