Engineering Manager, App Primitives

Job description

About this role

As the Engineering Manager, App Primitives at Vanta, you'll lead the team building the shared product primitives that every Vanta product team depends on, owning the infrastructure layer that makes collaboration, communication, and core workflows possible across the entire platform. Our Engineering Managers develop and grow high-performing teams that deliver significant value to our customers and enable our business to scale. This role sits at the intersection of technical architecture and team development, with real authority to set direction and grow a world-class platform team.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the App Primitives team, owning hiring, team health, delivery, and the development of senior engineers and technical leads
• Own the strategy and roadmap for Vanta's shared product primitives: comments infrastructure, notifications platform, event log, feature flag system (Statsig), and task management
• Define and steward the interface model between App Primitives systems and product teams, ensuring product teams can build on top of shared infrastructure quickly and safely, without owning the underlying systems themselves
• Partner closely with product engineering leaders across Vanta to surface developer needs, identify friction in shared systems, and prioritize investments that unlock velocity at scale
• Set technical direction for a full-stack team working across data models, backend services, and UI primitives, and earn the trust of senior engineers through strong technical judgment
• Manage cross-team dependencies and stakeholder expectations across concurrent workstreams, operating with a high degree of autonomy

Qualifications and requirements

• 5+ years of engineering experience with 2+ years managing engineering teams, including a track record of developing senior engineers and technical leads
• Experience leading platform, shared services, or product infrastructure teams — where your team's output is what other teams build on
• Technical fluency across the full stack, with enough depth in backend systems, shared data models, and API design to engage substantively with your team's technical decisions
• Strong cross-functional collaborator: able to partner with product, design, and engineering leaders to define clear ownership boundaries and drive alignment across teams
• Track record of hiring senior engineers in a competitive market and building a team culture people want to be part of
• Experience managing multi-team dependencies and delivering across concurrent workstreams with limited oversight
• Uses AI in day-to-day work to amplify their skills and strengthen their outcomes, applying it across routine workflows, actively building fluency through experimentation, and exercising sound judgment to ensure AI-assisted work meets a high quality bar.