Engineering Manager

Department: Engineering

Location: United States

Employment Type: FullTime

About Us

Socket helps devs and security teams ship faster by cutting out security busywork. Thousands of orgs use Socket to safely find, audit, and manage open source code. Our customers - from Anthropic to xAI, and Figma to Vercel - love Socket (just check out their tweets to see for yourself!)

Founded by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a long-time open source maintainer with software downloaded over a billion times a month, Socket has raised $125M in funding from top angels, operators, and security leaders.

About the Role

We're hiring an Engineering Manager to help lead our engineering team as we scale.

In this role, you'll work closely with engineers on technical challenges while helping the team navigate ambiguity, make thoughtful decisions, and deliver with speed and quality. Rather than directing every solution, you'll facilitate productive technical discussions, build alignment, and create the conditions for our engineers to do their best work.

We're looking for someone who can think strategically, stay close enough to the technical work to understand trade-offs, ask good questions, and help guide technical decisions, while leading through influence rather than authority. You'll help the team balance long-term technical investments with near-term execution, maintain a high bar for engineering quality, and create the clarity and alignment that enables engineers to move quickly without sacrificing thoughtful decision-making.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow a high-performing team of engineers by building a culture of trust, ownership, and autonomy where people can do their best work, make decisions, and continue to develop.

• Partner closely with engineering and go-to-market stakeholders to ensure the team is solving the right problems - not just building the right solutions.

• Stay engaged with technical decisions, helping the team reason through architecture, trade-offs, and complexity, without needing to make every decision yourself.

• Improve the process of how we work, identifying bottlenecks, refining processes, and automating away toil.

• Bring clarity to ambiguous problems by helping the team align on priorities, make thoughtful decisions, and maintain strong execution.

• Balance long-term technical investments with near-term business needs, ensuring the team delivers sustainable, high-quality outcomes.

• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement where engineers are empowered to lead and make decisions.

What You'll Bring

• Experience leading engineering teams in a fast-moving environment where priorities and solutions are not always clearly defined.

• Instinct to step toward ambiguous or unowned problems, including the unglamorous seams between teams.

• Strong technical judgment and the ability to engage deeply in architectural discussions, understand trade-offs, and guide technical decisions.

  • Comfort working in a TypeScript/JavaScript ecosystem is a plus, though we value strong engineering fundamentals over experience with a specific language or framework.

• Strong product sense: able to talk directly to customers, absorb inputs from many sources, and determine how a product should work.

• Communication that keeps other teams informed on your team’s goals, needs, and progress, and that provides your team with enough context to make good decisions even if you aren’t in the room.

• Experience managing in a remote environment, ideally with a globally-distributed team.

We know how important clarity is when looking for a new role, so we've put together a read-me about the Interview Process at Socket.

Benefits: Our benefits are crafted to support you and your family, so you can take care of what matters most and thrive in and outside of work. We offer:

• Market competitive salary bands

• Meaningful equity program

• Comprehensive health benefits for you and your family (99% coverage)

• Flexible time-off, holidays, and winter shutdown to rest & recharge

• Paid parental leave

• Remote-first, with quarterly team off-sites

At Socket, we

1. Pursue Excellence: We set ourselves apart by consistently delivering work of exceptional quality and distinction.

2. Move with urgency and focus: We prioritize swift, decisive action.

3. Think rigorously: We care about being right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there. We value alternative perspectives and have constructive discussions.

4. Trust and amplify: We overtrust, always assume good intent, and give specific feedback to help each other improve.

5. Feel a strong sense of ownership: We wear many hats and feel a strong sense of overall ownership of the company and we're non-territorial regarding our nominal domains.

6. Are customer obsessed: We relentlessly prioritize the needs of our customers, striving to exceed their expectations and delight them at every interaction.