Software Engineering Manager

About Spellbook

Spellbook provides an advanced AI copilot designed specifically for transactional lawyers, integrating seamlessly within Microsoft Word. It empowers legal teams to draft, review, and negotiate contracts with up to ten times more speed and enhanced accuracy. With over 4,000 law firms, in-house legal departments, and individual practitioners using Spellbook, the platform simplifies routine contract tasks. The company is well-funded, having recently raised $50 million in Series B led by Khosla Ventures, totaling over $80 million in capital from top-tier investors.

Position Overview

We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a compact team focused on developing AI-powered tools for legal professionals. This role blends hands-on technical leadership with accountability for product success, engineering quality, and nurturing team growth. Collaboration across product, design, and customer-facing teams is fundamental, as is influencing architecture and practical implementation decisions during development under uncertain conditions. Additionally, the role involves exploring how coding agents and automation can transform software development to boost outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product, design, and client teams to uncover key user challenges and shape product priorities.
• Gain a deep understanding of legal professionals’ workflows with Spellbook through direct engagement, data analysis, and observation.
• Establish and steer the technical vision, balancing customer impact, business value, risk, and platform scalability.
• Lead project execution, ensuring software quality, reliability, and tangible results.
• Remain hands-on by prototyping, architecting, implementing, and code reviewing key components.
• Experiment with and integrate coding agents and automation to enhance development efficiency and quality.
• Develop and enforce practical standards for code review, testing, and software operation involving engineers and AI agents.
• Mentor engineers to refine their technical acumen, product insight, and AI usage.
• Contribute strategic guidance on engineering practices as AI reshapes software creation and small-team capabilities.

Qualifications

• Minimum of five years’ experience in software development, including technical leadership within startups, scale-ups, or comparable fast-paced settings.
• Proficient knowledge of system design and web technologies, specifically JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node.js, and AWS.
• Proven track record in leading the development and maintenance of production-grade software.
• Hands-on experience regularly employing coding agents or comparable AI tools with demonstrable improvements in speed or quality.
• Strong ability to prototype rapidly, perform code reviews, assess technical solutions, and make pragmatic design decisions.
• Excellent product judgment with a history of translating ambiguous customer requirements into clear plans and successful product releases.
• Capability to balance short-term delivery goals with long-term reliability, maintainability, and system needs.
• Effective communication skills to align engineering, product, and design teams on critical decisions and trade-offs.
• Experience in mentoring engineers to reach high performance without excessive process overhead.

Preferred Skills

• Experience building products based on large language models (LLMs), agent workflows, or evaluation frameworks.
• Knowledge of deploying and reliably operating AI systems securely in production environments.
• History of launching scalable new products.
• Background as a founder or similar role involving broad ownership and responsibility.

Location and Compensation

This role requires candidates to be located in St. John's. Compensation details are not disclosed upfront as total remuneration exceeds statutory salary disclosure thresholds; discussions will be handled individually. Benefits include company-paid group insurance, mental health support funds, generous paid time off including holiday closures, monthly meals, wellness allowances, parental leave enhancements, and substantial stock option offerings as part of the company's early team.

Inclusion and Hiring Practices

Spellbook fosters an inclusive recruitment process and workplace, welcoming applicants irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, disability status, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristics. Accommodations during hiring are available upon request. AI is utilized responsibly to streamline administrative tasks during recruitment but human judgment remains central in hiring decisions.