Engineering Manager

[ABOUT ISTARI DIGITAL]

Istari is a digital engineering software company enabling our customers to turn the physical world into the digital to accomplish their specific mission or business objectives.

Istari was founded with the vision of making open, scalable digital engineering ecosystems a reality – where new technologies and systems are created digitally, free from the real-world constraints of costs and schedules. We are creating the world's best engineering model sharing platform, allowing our customers to simply and securely integrate their models across different engineering disciplines, organizations, and security levels.

At Istari, we are passionate about our mission of creating the world's first open and scalable industrial metaverse. Whether our customers are designing prototypes, performing virtual testing, or training AI and autonomy for complex systems, we know that going digital will save them time, resources, and reduce their environmental impact.

While we are a distributed team with most team-members working remotely, we place an emphasis on staying connected and collaborative, prioritizing in-person opportunities to build trust as a team. At Istari, we still believe that trust is best built in-person. To do this, we have an engineering headquarters in Cambridge, MA for focused technical development and several times per year we gather for an off-site that allows us to develop our professional skills and our team relationships.

[VALUES]

At Istari, we live by our values, which include:

Purposeful Autonomy
We value letting people self-organize and self-motivate.

Our flat structure and lack of meeting clutter are meant to empower individuals and teams to be proactive.

Our autonomy is measured, goal-oriented, and results-driven – not meandering.

Clear objectives help us prioritize our time.

Smart Transparency
We believe in honest-but-kind communication, transparency, and open-door policies.

We love learning about challenges and tackling them early, not hearing good or bad news late.

We share work-in-progress across our team.

Fast feedback keeps autonomy purposeful.

Continual Curiosity
At Istari, we love learning to do things ourselves.

We ask, read, share, teach – even watch YouTube videos – to learn new skills to solve problems.

When we make breakthroughs, we write them down.

Writing focuses ideas, helps us learn, and helps us share.

Equal Opportunity
Istari is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran status, or disability status.

We are seeking an
Engineering Manager – Data & Infrastructure
to lead the team responsible for the core data layer and operational foundation of the Istari platform. This team owns our open-source graph database (Dgraph), Kubernetes deployments, installation tooling for self-hosted customers, and the infrastructure required to operate in ITAR-restricted spaces. This role blends hands-on technical leadership with people management, guiding engineers while setting direction for secure, reliable, and scalable data and infrastructure capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Leadership & Execution: Lead, mentor, and develop a team focused on data systems, DevOps, and infrastructure reliability. Drive technical strategy and ensure consistent, high-quality execution across all team initiatives. Collaborate closely with product and security leadership to set roadmap priorities
• Data Platform Ownership: Oversee all engineering work related to Dgraph, including modifications to core database functionality, CI/CD pipelines, documentation and incident response. Assist in managing the open source community around Dgraph. Work across the team to develop a roadmap and priorities for Dgraph's evolution
• Infrastructure & Deployments: Mentor and guide a team improving Istari's Kubernetes-based platform, including Argo CD, Helm charts, and deployment automation. Manage a roadmap for technical improvements to customer installation tooling, monitoring, and observability. Lead the team in planning and executing deployments into ITAR-controlled and other restricted environments, ensuring all compliance requirements are met. Partner with security teams on architecture reviews, risk mitigation, and secure-by-default practices

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading technical teams
• Experience leading teams managing infrastructure technologies like Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Postgres and other databases
• Background in managing distributed systems, databases, and data infrastructure (stateful systems strongly preferred)
• Experience delivering and supporting self-hosted or on-prem enterprise software
• Solid AWS experience (EKS, VPC networking, IAM, and related services preferred)
• Must be a US citizen living within the United States

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with developing database technologies - graph databases in particular
• Knowledge of cybersecurity and compliance frameworks such as NIST, CMMC, or FedRAMP
• Experience supporting ITAR or other restricted federal environments
• Familiarity with IaC tools (e.g., Terraform), service meshes, and observability stacks

Benefits
We offer highly competitive benefits, including:

Health and Family

• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Employee Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Life Insurance
• Flexible Work Hours
• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO) with federal government holidays

Financial

• Competitive Compensation
• 401k
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Setup Budget

Learning

• Reimbursement for approved trainings and subscriptions
• Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Note - some benefits are not available to interns or contractors.

Thank you for your interest in Istari. Expect to hear back from us soon with next steps.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.