Dispatch is a Y Combinator-backed space logistics company building reusable autonomous reentry vehicles and uncrewed space stations to enable high-frequency, low-cost cargo return and in-space manufacturing for industries including pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and biology.
Role overview: - Lead one of Dispatch's product engineering teams — the team responsible for our core user workflow and data orchestration platform. - Own engineering execution end to end: roadmap sequencing with Product, project scoping, timeline accountability, and cross-functional progress communication. - Serve as the connective tissue between Product and Engineering — ensuring the team builds the right things in the right order, at the pace the business demands. - Drive engineering hiring end-to-end: headcount planning, JDs, interview loops, and closing. What you'll own: - Team Building & Development — Hire, onboard, and develop a growing team of engineers. Create a culture of high standards, ownership, and craft — making Dispatch an exceptional place to build. - Engineering Execution — Own the delivery system: project scoping, milestone planning, timeline accountability, and stakeholder communication. Ensure the team ships on time, with consistency and quality, across the core product, integrations, and platform. - Engineering Acceleration — Partner with staff engineers and tech leads who own technical decisions and architecture. Your job is to remove friction, raise the floor, and identify opportunities to accelerate the team through better tooling and automation. - Cross-Functional Operating Model — Work closely with Product and Design to triage, prioritize, and sequence work. Serve as the escalation point for customer-impacting engineering issues and coordinate resolution with CS and Product. - Incident & Production Management — Own the team's on-call posture, incident response process, and post-mortems. Drive improvements that reduce recurrence and increase system reliability. Experience & Background: - 10+ years in software engineering, including meaningful time as an IC and as an Engineering Manager. - 5+ years as an individual contributor engineer, with a track record of shipping high-quality, high-complexity systems - 5+ years managing engineering teams that have done the same - Proven track record of growing and scaling an engineering organization — ideally from a small team to 20–30+ engineers. - Experience at an early-stage startup — Series B or earlier, or fewer than 100 people at time of joining. Characteristics: - Player-Coach — you don't manage from a distance. You're in the weeds when it matters: unblocking hard problems, running tight team processes, and setting the standard through your own work. You lead by doing, not just directing. - High-Output Operator — you know how to get the most out of a team. You bring the right combination of coaching, accountability, and hands-on support to build a group that moves fast, executes with quality, and keeps raising the bar. - Systems Builder — you create just enough structure to keep a fast-moving team aligned — without letting process become overhead. You build what's needed to hire well, run cleanly, and ship consistently, and you know when to stop. - People Developer — you're genuinely invested in making engineers better. You coach actively, give direct feedback, and create an environment where people grow fast and do their best work. - Strong Cross-Functional Operator — you work fluidly with Product and GTM, translate between technical and business contexts, and hold the team accountable to outcomes that matter to customers — not just engineering metrics. You'll stand out if you have: - Experience at seed/early-stage startups — being an early engineer or engineering manager during rapid growth phases - Experience with: - Building and shipping software for enterprise customers — understanding the complexity of long sales cycles, multi-stakeholder implementations, and the reliability expectations that come with it. - Building with leading fintech APIs (Plaid, Stripe, etc). - Building APIs-as-a-product and/or B2B products. - Building data-intensive B2B platforms — particularly systems that orchestrate, sync, or transform data across third-party integrations. - Experience founding or building something from scratch — a company, a product, or a meaningful side project. - Experience with AI prompting, models, and tools — someone who not only leverages these in their work, but can help level up the team. - Experience with our tech stack: - Backend: Golang, Postgres, AWS, Messaging, Protobuf, gRPC, Redis, GitHub Actions, Containerization, Terraform - Frontend: React, Node, Fastify, MUI, React Query, Vite, Storybook, Playwright Dispatch provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.