Movable Ink scales content personalization for marketers through data-activated content generation and AI decisioning. The world’s most innovative brands rely on Movable Ink to maximize revenue, simplify workflow and boost marketing agility. Headquartered in New York City with close to 600 employees, Movable Ink serves its global client base with operations throughout North America, Central America, Europe, Australia, and Japan.

Movable Ink is standing up a new Orchestration team to build the next-generation AI decisioning layer that coordinates every message a brand sends across email, mobile, and other channels. We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead this team, hire its first engineers, and partner with a Lead Engineer and senior technical stakeholders to take the system from prototype to production. This is a hands-on, player-coach role at the intersection of distributed systems and machine learning, with high executive visibility and the opportunity to shape one of the most strategic engineering investments at the company.

This role will be reporting to the Director of Engineering (AI/ML).

Responsibilities

Lead People: recruit, mentor, and grow a founding team of engineers building the orchestration platform. Foster a culture of ownership, curiosity, and continuous improvement
Shape the Technical Direction: partner with the Lead Engineer and senior technical stakeholders to converge on architecture, scope, and milestones for the system, with a clear path from prototype to production
Deliver Production Value: drive key initiatives from concept to delivery, translating product goals into clear technical plans and ensuring the team ships high-quality, reliable systems
Build the Platform: lead development of a scalable, event-driven, fault-tolerant system that processes high-volume real-time messaging decisions across workflows and channels
Guide System Design: provide hands-on technical leadership for complex distributed, stateful, and real-time decisioning problems, contributing directly to architecture and design
Partner Across the Platform: collaborate closely with Product, Machine Learning, Data Platform, and adjacent engineering teams to ensure the orchestration layer integrates cleanly into the broader product
Drive Operational Excellence: ensure the platform operates reliably at scale through strong observability, metrics, incident response practices, and shared on-call responsibilities for business-critical services

Qualifications

7+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineers, with a track record of recruiting, mentoring, and growing high-trust engineering teams
A player-coach leadership style — comfortable guiding engineers while staying close to the technical work and contributing to architecture, design, and implementation when needed
Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems that are fault tolerant, highly available, and highly concurrent
Strong systems thinking, with sound architectural judgment around event-driven, stateful, real-time decisioning systems
Experience building and operating backend services in a modern cloud environment (we use Google Cloud Platform)
Hands-on experience with microservice and service-oriented architectures, including the inter-service communication patterns that compose them — synchronous, event-sourced, orchestrated, and asynchronous (we use gRPC and Kafka)
Strong foundation in Python
Experience with Elixir — which we use for building concurrent, fault-tolerant services — is a strong plus. Experience with Erlang, Scala/Akka, Go, or Clojure also transfers well
Practical experience evaluating and designing for distributed systems fundamentals: partitioning, replication, back-pressure, idempotency, and failure handling
Exemplary software engineering practices (system design, code review, testing, CI/CD)
Strong focus on operational excellence, including observability, incident response, and healthy on-call practices
Clear communicator and collaborator who can translate technical tradeoffs into practical decisions with product and business stakeholders