Senior Engineering Manager, AI Product (Thunderbolt)

MZLA Technologies Corporation is the nonprofit-owned company behind Thunderbird and part of the Mozilla family. MZLA operates independently from Mozilla Corporation, with its own compensation programs, benefits, and employment policies. Thunderbird is a trusted open-source email application empowering millions globally, committed to building privacy-respecting communication tools. Thunderbolt is MZLA's new open-source, cross-platform AI product initiative, focusing on user control over data and AI infrastructure. The company fosters a collaborative, inclusive, user-first, and open-source by design culture, with a global team distributed across seven countries.

Introduction

Thunderbird is a globally trusted open-source email application empowering over 20 million people. MZLA, the team behind Thunderbird, is expanding its product line with "Thunderbolt," an open-source, cross-platform AI product initiative. Thunderbolt aims to provide AI capabilities while allowing users to retain control over their data, infrastructure, and model choices. We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Thunderbolt team as it transitions from R&D to a mature, enterprise-ready product.

This is a hands-on technical management role where you will manage a senior engineering team, contribute to the codebase, and coordinate work to deliver a reliable, enterprise-ready open-source AI product. The ideal candidate will possess strong people management skills, sound product engineering judgment, and technical depth to guide architectural decisions and ensure product quality.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering execution by clarifying priorities, ownership, timelines, risks, dependencies, and quality expectations.
• Manage engineers and contractors, including coaching, feedback, prioritization, performance support, and team development.
• Stay closely engaged with the codebase by contributing code, reviewing technical work, evaluating tradeoffs, and helping the team maintain momentum and quality.
• Partner with technical and product leadership to translate product direction, AI strategy, user experience goals, and technical priorities into coordinated engineering plans.
• Establish and improve planning, review, release, and follow-through practices to enhance predictability and reduce bottlenecks.
• Maintain high standards for code quality, testing, documentation, reliability, security awareness, maintainability, and release readiness.
• Build strong product and architectural context across AI-enabled workflows, integrations, local-first or customer-controlled architectures, and release requirements.
• Partner across product, design, enterprise-facing teams, and technical leadership to balance speed, user experience, privacy, quality, enterprise readiness, and long-term sustainability.
• Lead hiring, onboarding, and resource planning as the Thunderbolt engineering team grows.
• Help Thunderbolt scale from an incubation-stage product into a reliable, enterprise-ready open-source AI product.

Requirements

• 15+ years of professional software development experience, including significant experience in senior engineering leadership or complex product delivery roles.
• 5+ years of experience managing technical teams, including senior engineers or senior individual contributors.
• A track record of leading a team that has shipped polished, top-tier products with a genuine standard of craft.
• Strong ability to translate ambiguous product and technical direction into clear plans, ownership models, and delivery momentum.
• Technical fluency with AI-enabled products, including the ability to evaluate tradeoffs across areas such as LLM applications, RAG workflows, agents, enterprise search, automation, on-device AI, or AI evaluation.
• Demonstrated experience delivering complex applications across multiple platforms, such as desktop, web, and mobile, using technologies such as Tauri, Electron, React Native, or comparable frameworks.
• Experience with enterprise software, regulated environments, or similarly complex technical products, including security, privacy, compliance readiness, administration, integrations, and customer-controlled deployment models.
• Practical experience with local-first, offline-capable, self-hosted, hybrid, on-premise, air-gapped, or other customer-controlled product architectures, including tradeoffs related to data storage, sync, privacy, reliability, and user experience.
• Experience improving engineering practices related to technical planning, code review, release readiness, testing, documentation, CI/CD, maintainability, or technical debt management.
• Excellent communication skills regarding technical prioritization, release risk, ownership, quality expectations, and tradeoffs.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in open-source or maintainer-style engineering environments.
• Experience with compliance or security standards such as SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, or similar frameworks.
• Experience helping take a product from zero to one in a startup or new product initiative.

Benefits

• Work & Career
  • Fully remote work & schedule flexibility
  • Company-provided laptop
  • Annual bonus program
  • Monthly remote work stipend
  • Annual professional development stipend
  • Access to Coursera learning platform
  • Industry conferences
  • Company all-hands and team gatherings
• Rest & Play
  • 24 days PTO per year (prorated)
  • Your birthday off
  • Year-end company shutdown
  • 9 wellbeing days
  • Public holidays
  • Other paid leave
  • Quarterly wellbeing stipend for personal/family activities
• Health & Family
  • 401(k) contributions
  • Health, dental, & vision insurance
  • Disability insurance
  • Life insurance
  • Employee assistance program
  • Paid parental leave
  • Paid sick days

About Company

MZLA Technologies Corporation is the nonprofit-owned company behind Thunderbird and part of the Mozilla family. MZLA operates independently from Mozilla Corporation, with its own compensation programs, benefits, and employment policies. Thunderbird is a trusted open-source email application empowering millions globally, committed to building privacy-respecting communication tools. Thunderbolt is MZLA's new open-source, cross-platform AI product initiative, focusing on user control over data and AI infrastructure. The company fosters a collaborative, inclusive, user-first, and open-source by design culture, with a global team distributed across seven countries.

How to Apply

Applicants must reside in and have permanent work authorization for the specified country location(s). Visa sponsorship is not provided. Please apply directly through our career page. We carefully review every cover letter and screening question, so take the time to answer each fully. We value authentic, thoughtful responses that reflect your own experience and perspective. While it is acceptable to use AI tools for writing polish, your answers must be original. Candidates who submit generic or unoriginal AI-generated responses may be disqualified.