About the role
About Workato
Workato is the leading Control and Execution Platform for Enterprise AI - the neutral platform enterprises trust to put AI to work across their business. Workato unifies data, applications, and processes into a single platform so AI can reliably orchestrate business processes in production at enterprise scale. Built on more than a decade of running mission-critical processes for over half the Fortune 500 - including Nasdaq, Amazon, Cisco, Vodafone, Atlassian, and Lucid Motors - Workato turns over 14,000 enterprise systems AI needs to act on into one governed execution layer. For more information, visit workato.com.
Why join us?
Ultimately, Workato believes in fostering a flexible, trust-oriented culture that empowers everyone to take full ownership of their roles. We are driven by innovation and looking for team players who want to actively build our company.
But, we also believe in balancing productivity with self-care. That's why we offer all of our employees a vibrant and dynamic work environment along with a multitude of benefits they can enjoy inside and outside of their work lives.
If this sounds right up your alley, please submit an application. We look forward to getting to know you!
Also, feel free to check out why
Business Insider named us an "enterprise startup to bet your career on"
Forbes' Cloud 100 recognized us as one of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world
Deloitte Tech Fast 500 ranked us as the 17th fastest growing tech company in the Bay Area, and 96th in North America
Quartz ranked us the #1 best company for remote workers
Responsibilities
We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a team building core internal infrastructure and developer-facing systems. This role sits at the intersection of project management, engineering leadership, and platform development. The team (Evaluation Engines / Data processing engines) owns foundational components which are embedded into higher level workflow engines and tools. Examples are formula evaluation, data transformation according to predefined mapping, decision models, etc.
The team is technically strong and highly autonomous. We are looking for an Engineering Manager who can operate effectively in this environment: someone with a strong engineering background who understands complex systems, but does not need to be the deepest technical expert in every area.
Your role will be to help experienced engineers work effectively together, create clarity across interconnected initiatives, and improve how the team plans, collaborates, and delivers.
What You'll Do
Lead a strong engineering team
You will manage and develop experienced engineers with significant ownership of their technical domains. The team is mostly Rust engineers, however they also build libraries for several other programming languages: Go, Ruby, Java, Python, and WASM.
You will be responsible for regular 1:1s, feedback, performance management, career development, hiring, onboarding, and team health.
We expect you to create an environment where engineers can remain highly autonomous while having clear priorities, ownership, and accountability. You will be responsible for team capacity planning and hiring when needed.
Build strong product
You will be working closely with Product Managers and department VP to define how the products look, what to build and in which order, what new exciting features we can bring to our customers. As this area is highly technical and speaks Computer Science terms at times, Product Managers will greatly rely on your and your team expertise to make decisions.
You will be responsible for working with Quality Engineering and Product Security teams to deliver high-quality products. At the same time in this AI era we expect you to embrace new tools to shift quality and security scans left.
Drive planning and execution
The team owns several interconnected technical areas, often developed across separate repositories and involving dependencies between engineers and projects.
You will
Own planning and operational execution across multiple engineering workstreams.
Create visibility into priorities, dependencies, timelines, and resource allocation.
Help the team turn broad technical direction into an executable roadmap.
Identify and remove blockers before they significantly impact delivery.
Balance new development, customer commitments, operational work, and technical debt.
Define meaningful engineering metrics and use them to identify opportunities for improvement.
Keep stakeholders informed about progress, risks, and trade-offs.
Plan release and update cycles of the product.
Maintain the product, be responsible for defects triaging and mitigation.
Stay close to technology
This is strictly not a purely people-management role. Technical background and experience is a must.
We don't expect you to be a fluent Rust developer, we in fact are not expecting you to know Rust at all. But you should be comfortable participating in technical discussions, reviewing designs and architecture proposals, understanding engineering trade-offs, and challenging assumptions when needed. You should have a wide industry knowledge, and understand the pros and cons of different programming languages and platforms.
Depending on your background and interests, you may also review code, contribute to tooling or prototypes, participate in incident investigation, or use automation and AI-assisted development to improve engineering workflows.
At the same time, we do not expect the Engineering Manager to make every technical decision. Senior engineers (your team will contain a mix of engineers up to Staff and Architect levels) own significant parts of the technical direction, and a key part of the role is enabling them to do that effectively.
What We're Looking For
We are looking for someone with
Significant software engineering experience before or alongside engineering management.
Experience managing senior, autonomous engineers.
A strong background in platform engineering, developer infrastructure, developer productivity, backend infrastructure, or distributed systems.
Experience with CI/CD, release engineering, developer tooling, or internal engineering platforms.
Experience owning roadmaps and delivering multi-quarter engineering initiatives.
Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and engineering practices.
Experience managing technical debt alongside product and business priorities.
Ability to understand complex technical discussions without needing to personally own every implementation decision.
Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional communication skills.
Experience hiring, coaching, and developing engineers.
A pragmatic approach to engineering processes: enough structure to make teams effective, without unnecessary bureaucracy.
What Makes Someone Successful in This Role
You are comfortable joining a team where engineers may understand individual systems more deeply than you do.
Instead of trying to become the technical owner of every component, you ask the right questions, understand trade-offs, create clarity, and help engineers make good decisions together.
You enjoy finding problems in the engineering system itself: unclear ownership, slow reviews, hidden dependencies, fragmented tooling, competing priorities, or processes that depend too heavily on individuals pushing things forward.
You can move between a conversation about architecture or CI pipelines, a 1:1 with an engineer, roadmap prioritization with Product, and a discussion about why delivery is taking longer than expected.
You are comfortable aligning your team roadmap with requirements from Product Managers, and from Engineering leadership, which may be different, and working with different stakeholders in general.
Most importantly, you combine technical credibility with strong people and execution leadership.
Nice to Have
Experience with some of the following would be particularly relevant
Golang or Rust; understanding of WASM platform.
Basic understanding of formal grammar, AST, compiler frontends.
Observability and operational tooling.
Open-source development.
AI-assisted software development and automated code review.
PostgreSQL or database infrastructure.
Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, or cloud infrastructure.
Multi-repository development environments.
Developer-facing APIs, SDKs, libraries, or integrations.