Senior Engineering Manager, Workload Orchestration at nTop – New York, New York

nTop builds parametric design software for the hardest geometry problems in aerospace, defense, and industrial turbo-machinery. Our platform lets engineers define a design as a parametric program — a model that represents not one aircraft or turbine, but every variant of it that a program might need to consider. Customers use nTop to compress the journey from requirements to fielded systems, replacing years of iterative hand-modeling with systematic exploration across design spaces that were previously too large to search.

The next step in that journey is scale. The unit of work is no longer an individual engineer at a screen — it's a large-scale distributed computation: thousands of design variants evaluated in parallel, across cloud, HPC, and on-prem infrastructure, with results feeding directly into AI-driven optimization and generative design workflows. We're building the product that makes that possible.

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to build and lead the engineering team responsible for workload orchestration — the infrastructure and product capabilities that let nTop customers define, launch, monitor, and collect results from large-scale distributed computation jobs.

This is a new team in a greenfield product area. You will hire, develop, and lead a team of 5–8 engineers while personally contributing to the architecture and early implementation of systems that span containerized headless execution, job scheduling and orchestration, integration with third-party platforms (HEEDS, ModelCenter, PhysicsX Flux), and deployment across customer-managed environments from GPU workstations to cloud-scale Kubernetes clusters.

You will partner closely with a Product Manager who owns the product strategy and roadmap for this area. Your job is to own the technical strategy and execution: how the systems are designed, how the team operates, and how the engineering work translates into a product that works reliably in environments with real constraints — IT governance, export control, air-gapped networks, and heterogeneous compute infrastructure.

The north-star metric for this team is headless nTop notebook executions: customers exploring more design variations, in less wall-clock time, without a human in the loop for every run.

Recruit, hire, and develop a high-performing team of 5–8 engineers. Set clear expectations, provide direct and constructive feedback, and create an environment where engineers do the best work of their careers. As the founding manager of this team, you will define the team's engineering culture, practices, and norms from the ground up.

Define the architecture for nTop's headless execution and workload orchestration infrastructure. Make the hard calls on build vs. integrate vs. partner — where nTop owns the stack natively and where it delegates to third-party orchestration platforms or cloud-native services. Ensure the systems you design work across the full range of customer deployment environments: local workstations, on-prem HPC clusters, and cloud.

This is a player-coach role. In the first year, you'll be hands-on — contributing to design, writing production code, reviewing pull requests, and making architectural decisions in the codebase alongside your team. As the team matures, the balance shifts toward leadership, but you will remain technically credible and engaged throughout.

Lead the engineering execution for integrations with orchestration platforms our customers already rely on — HEEDS, ModelCenter, PhysicsX Flux, and cloud-native job services from AWS and GCP. Deliver the first-party headless execution experience: containerized job definition, submission, monitoring, failure handling, and results collection.

Work with the Product Manager to translate product strategy into engineering plans. Provide grounded technical input on feasibility, sequencing, and risk. Push back when plans don't account for real constraints; propose alternatives when they don't.

Our customers are defense contractors, aerospace OEMs, and industrial manufacturers. Their infrastructure is governed by security policies, export control regulations, and IT organizations that move deliberately. You will engage directly with advanced users and IT stakeholders to understand these constraints and design systems that work within them — not around them.

You've assessed the technical landscape, drafted an initial systems architecture, and begun hiring. You have a clear picture of the highest-risk technical decisions and a plan for resolving them. You've met with at least three customer engineering or IT teams to understand their deployment environments and constraints firsthand.

The team is staffed (5+ engineers) and delivering. At least one major integration is live. The containerized headless execution pipeline is in production with at least one design partner. You've established the team's engineering practices — CI/CD, testing strategy, incident response, and deployment patterns — and they're working.

You'll build a team and a product area from scratch, reporting directly to the CTO, in a domain where the technical problems are genuinely hard and the customers care deeply about getting it right. The shift from individual-engineer CAD to large-scale parallel computation is one of the most consequential transitions happening in engineering software. This role is at the center of it — and the ownership is real.