--- title: 'Engineering Manager at Ansa' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-ansa-san-francisco-06pk81fe1xx8' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-11' --- # Engineering Manager at Ansa - **Company:** Ansa - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Posted:** 2025-02-07 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/ansa/jobs/4502717008 ## Job description It’s time that payments work for merchants, not the other way around. Ansa is building a branded wallet solution to increase customer retention and unlock new growth opportunities. Ansa helps innovative and growing companies by providing an enterprise-grade, white-label stored value wallet platform paired with incentive tooling. Our platform enables our customers to turn stored value and loyalty programs into a powerful growth engine that increases customer retention, drives repeat purchases, and boosts margins, all without the cost and complexity of building it in-house. We’re seeking a dynamic Engineering Manager to lead our growing engineering team, build and scale high-availability payment infrastructure, and champion our core values. You’ll work hand in hand with our founder and CEO to define and shape our product roadmap, define and champion engineering excellence, and grow our organization! 🤔 What you will be doing? - Lead a first-class engineering team, proactively identifying and addressing gaps as we scale. - Foster a supportive, collaborative, high-performance in-person culture. - Collaborate with leadership to set the direction for the broader eng team, balancing strategic and company scaling challenges with thoughtful long-term product & infra planning. - Own and expand recruiting efforts while maintaining a high technical bar. - Build diverse, inclusive teams and help team members grow through coaching, mentoring, and direct feedback. - Serve as a sounding board for architectural and strategic technical decisions. - Manage the day-to-day operations of the engineering team, unblocking progress. - Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to rapidly innovate and execute company priorities and maintain efficiency. 👋🏼 About you - 6+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience in leading and scaling engineering teams during periods of high growth in early/mid-stage startups. - Have a proven track record in attracting, hiring, and nurturing top engineering talent, with 2+ years in people-management roles. - Possess deep knowledge of modern software development practices, architecture, and infrastructure, with a background in building and scaling complex, high-availability systems. - Can drive technical strategy and make informed decisions that balance immediate needs with future goals. - Demonstrate profound thoughtfulness around engineering culture, process, and identity. - Possess a clear and engaging communication style with a track record of navigating ambiguity, managing stakeholders, and building positive relationships across a broad, diverse organization. - Based in the SF Bay Area (or willing to relocate). 😊 Nice to haves - Solid understanding of payments technology - payment acquiring, processing, and schemes; mobile, online, and offline payment platforms, models, and flows. - Experience working within fintech. 🎉 Our culture We’re a small team with a big mission. That means we have to hold ourselves to a high bar, by design. With limited resources and high ambition, excellence in quality, communication, and ownership, ambition isn’t optional — it’s how we move forward. - Ownership — if you see it, you take it. We don’t wait to be told. - Nosiness — curiosity across boundaries, asking questions, stepping beyond scope to solve problems. - High agency — proactive and self-directed. You move the work, not the other way around. - Accountability — we do what we say, and communicate proactively - Relentless drive — we work with focused intensity and follow through, even when it’s hard. - Thoughtful execution — shipping work that’s not just fast, but intentional. Think about how decisions today will affect us down the road. - Pride in your craft — we sweat the details and take our work personally, because it reflects who we are. - Kindness and trust — we give each other respect, empathy, and the benefit of the doubt. We assume good intent and act like teammates. 🥞 Benefits - Stellar health, dental, vision insurance coverage, including fertility benefits and One Medical. - Unlimited PTO and observed local holidays. - We also offer 401(k), healthcare FSA, and dependent care FSA to fit your needs. ## About Ansa ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Ansa is developing an enzymatic DNA synthesis platform to write long, high-fidelity genes from scratch, dramatically accelerating biotechnology research and manufacturing. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A) - **Headquarters**: Emeryville, California, USA - **Founded**: 2018 - **Founders**: Daniel Lin-Arlow, Sebastian Palluk ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Synthetic Biology / Biotechnology / DNA Synthesis - **Target customers**: B2B – life sciences researchers, biopharma companies, synthetic biology firms, diagnostics and therapeutics developers, and bio-manufacturing organizations. - **Mission statement**: "Revolutionize the way we make DNA." ## Products & Services - **Custom DNA Synthesis (Enzymatic)**: Ansa’s core service produces long, complex, high-fidelity DNA sequences using a proprietary enzymatic process (published in *Nature Biotechnology*). This is a **service** offering that replaces traditional chemical-based gene synthesis, enabling faster turnaround and access to sequences that are difficult or impossible to synthesize chemically. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed. - **Key Metric (Funding)**: Ansa has raised a total of **$28 million** in known funding (Seed + Series A). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lead investors include **Felicis Ventures** and **Northpond Ventures**. Other backers include **Hummingbird Ventures** and **Civilization Ventures**. - **Growth Signals**: The company has moved from R&D into commercial production, recently launching its first custom gene synthesis service. It is actively scaling manufacturing through automation and process engineering (as evidenced by a new "Senior Director, Technical Operations & Automation" role). The technology was validated by publication in a top-tier scientific journal (*Nature Biotechnology*). ## Competitive Advantages - **Enzymatic Moat**: Unlike nearly all competitors that use chemical (phosphoramidite) synthesis, Ansa uses an engineered template-independent DNA polymerase to build DNA. This enzymatic approach enables the synthesis of longer, more complex sequences with fewer errors, addressing a key bottleneck in the industry. - **Hard Tech + Biology**: The platform is a deep integration of molecular biology, protein engineering, and custom instrumentation, creating a significant barrier to replication. - **Founding Team Expertise**: The founders are domain experts who developed the core technology at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and UC Berkeley. ## Strategic Focus - **Scale & Commercialization**: Ansa’s current priority is scaling its manufacturing capacity from R&D to industrial production. This includes building lab automation, process engineering teams, and QA/ISO readiness. - **Product Expansion**: The company is expanding its product management and commercial teams to bring its enzymatic synthesis service to a broader customer base in therapeutics, diagnostics, and bio-manufacturing. - **Automation & Data**: A strong focus on informatics (Bioinformatics Data Scientist role) and instrument control software to drive yield, reduce cost, and optimize the synthesis process. ## Why Work Here - **High-Impact Mission**: Employees directly enable the next generation of biotech solutions for climate change, healthcare, and food security. - **Culture Values**: The company emphasizes **innovation** (rigorous engineering), **collaboration** (transparency, humility), and **care** (kindness, respect, high-trust environment). - **Location & Policy**: Based in Emeryville, CA (San Francisco Bay Area). Roles are primarily **in-office**, with some hybrid flexibility noted for certain positions. - **Compensation & Benefits**: Competitive base salaries, stock options, comprehensive medical/dental/vision for employees and dependents, 401k, flexible vacation, and parental leave. - **Team Size**: Approximately 94 employees, offering a tight-knit, cross-disciplinary environment (biology, chemistry, software, hardware, engineering). ## Sources 1. [ansabio.com](https://ansabio.com/company/careers/) 2. [job-boards.greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/ansabiotechnologies) 3. 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