---
title: 'Engineering Manager - Core Infra at Cinder'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-core-infra-cinder-new-york-pt3gvryrakk2'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Engineering Manager - Core Infra at Cinder

- **Company:** Cinder
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Compensation:** $240k–$280k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-06-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cinder/bf8990e5-a3de-4682-a218-841607e0f0d5/application

**Skills:** Production Software Development, High-throughput Systems, Data-intensive Systems, Workflow/Automation Engines, AI-powered Platforms, Full Stack Engineering, Architecture Design, Roadmap Planning, SLI/SLO Definition, DORA Metrics, Trust & Safety, Abuse Prevention, Product Engineering, Customer-facing Engineering

> The Engineering Manager will own the Core Infra team, setting priorities, raising execution quality, and coaching engineers to build a self-organizing team. This role involves leading architecture discussions, driving operational rigor, and acting as a liaison to cross-functional partners while contributing directly...

## Job description

## About Cinder

Cinder is the mission-critical infrastructure that keeps the world's most important digital platforms true to what they stand for. The internet has always been abused by bad actors, and AI is making it exponentially worse, driving fraud, abuse, and manipulation at a scale and speed no human team can fight alone. Cinder gives platforms one command center to fight back: to write and enforce policy, deploy AI agents against abuse in real time, investigate threats, file NCMEC reports, and prove their safety programs are working. Our customers are some of the largest internet platforms in the world. The decisions made in our software directly determine what stays up, what comes down, and how users are treated. We're a small, fast-moving team backed by Accel and Y Combinator. We care about being intentional, direct, and deeply focused on solving real customer problems.

## Why this role

Cinder’s Core Infrastructure team builds the platform and infrastructure that judges the safety of much of the user-generated content on the internet. This journey requires extreme focus and ruthless prioritization. We have talented engineers working across agents, workflows, review tooling, platform reliability, and data, but execution quality and prioritization still depend too much on individuals self-managing their priorities rather than teams that run themselves. We're hiring an Engineering Manager to own the Core Infra team end to end: to set clear priorities, raise the bar on execution quality and speed, and turn a group of strong ICs into a team that self-organizes around problems. Management is the heart of this role, but it isn't a process-only job. Most of your time will go into leading, coaching, and unblocking your team, while you will stay close enough to the code to contribute directly, lead architecture discussions credibly, and earn your engineers' trust as a technical peer. You'll report to our Head of Engineering and have real influence on how we build out engineering leadership as the org scales.

## What you'll work on

You'll own the health, direction, and delivery of the Core Infra team. In practice that means:

- Setting clear priorities and a roadmap your team understands. Engineers should know what they're working on, why it matters to the business, and what we're choosing not to do. You'll bring the business context behind the work and translate it into focused execution.
- Raising the bar on team-level execution quality. Not just shipping features, but shipping them with fewer regressions, clear ownership, and no last-minute surprises. You'll find the inefficiencies slowing your team down and fix them before they become someone's bad on-call week.
- Building a team that self-organizes. Individual heroics create single points of failure and burnout risk. You'll grow and evolve a team that can triage and share work across itself and with other teams.
- Coaching and developing engineers. You’ll set clear expectations against role and provide direct, constructive feedback promptly and empathetically. People should always know how they're progressing and where they need to grow.
- Driving operational rigor proactively. Helping define SLIs/SLOs for your team's systems and getting ahead of reliability and tech-debt problems to get ahead of incidents.
- Acting as the default liaison to GTM, FDE, CX and other cross-functional partners, and picking up technical work alongside your team when it helps, without becoming a blocker.

## What we're looking for

- 8+ years building production software with at least 4 years in a startup environment, managing platform engineers directly. You've owned a team's delivery, not just your own, and you've grown ICs into stronger engineers.
- Deep familiarity with high-throughput, data-intensive systems, workflow/automation engines, or AI-powered platforms in production, with experience managing full stack engineers
- A track record of turning a group of individual contributors into a high-performing team: clear priorities, shared ownership, and execution that doesn't depend on any one person.
- Strong enough technically to earn your team's trust. You can lead architecture and trade-off discussions, review work credibly, and jump into the code when it helps. We use AI tooling extensively and expect you to be fluent and opinionated about how it changes the way teams build.
- Experience setting roadmaps and priorities in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment, and the judgment to decide what to deprioritize, not just what to do.
- A real point of view on what high-performing engineering teams look like and how to measure them, with experience driving reliability, quality, or operational metrics like DORA.
- You give direct, constructive feedback as a matter of course, and you deliver it in a way people can act on.
- Clear written communication. We're a distributed team concentrated in NYC and we work closely with customer-facing teams. You write clearly in PRs, Slack, planning docs, and cross-functional updates.

## Nice to have

- Experience in Trust & Safety or abuse prevention. Understanding how attackers exploit platforms gives you a head start.
- Experience operating at the Product ↔ Engineering boundary, or in a customer-facing engineering capacity.

Location & Benefits We're based in NYC and would relocate the right person for this role. We believe in working together in person and hold at least two all-company events per year. We offer health, vision & dental benefits, a 401(k) plan with employer matching, fully paid commuter benefits, and a fully stocked office with paid lunch and dinner.

## About Cinder

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cinder provides mission-critical trust and safety infrastructure that protects online platforms from AI-powered abuse, fraud, and manipulation.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: New York City, USA
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Glen Wise and Phil Brennan

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Trust and Safety, AI Infrastructure, Cybersecurity
- **Target customers**: B2B; platforms of all sizes from startups to enterprises, including frontier AI labs, e-commerce, and social media companies
- **Mission or purpose**: To protect the internet from AI-powered abuse by building infrastructure that outmatches the speed and scale of AI-empowered bad actors.

## Products & Services
- **Cinder Platform**: A single command center for every safety workflow and tool. It centralizes policies, data consolidation, and AI-backed automations to improve alignment and efficiency. Features include real-time detection, context-aware decisions, AI red teaming, quality assurance, and explainability/audit trails.
- **Custom AI Agents**: Configurable agents that enforce standards and policies across millions of decisions, adapting to specific policies and learning continuously from mistakes and successes. They can examine images, conversations, full user profiles, and networks of related entities.
- **Managed Operations**: Expert services for content moderation, case investigation, IP and copyright enforcement, user fraud and account takeover detection, and custom agent development.
- **Data Labeling**: Accurate, AI-ready training data with real-time evaluation and faster turnaround.
- **Applicant Fraud Detection**: Vetting candidates for sensitive roles using the same intelligence applied to abuse detection, integrated directly into an ATS.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Raised $41M in Series B funding (announced in 2024)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Winter 2022 batch), with Brad Flora as primary partner. Integrates with IWF, Salesforce, StopNCII, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Processes 400M+ events daily, protects 3B+ end-users, automates 94% of human review, saves 100k+ hours, and achieves >97% AI moderation accuracy. The company is scaling rapidly to combat the surge in AI-generated abuse.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Agentic AI Infrastructure**: Unlike off-the-shelf classifiers, Cinder’s AI agents adapt to specific policies, learn continuously from mistakes and successes, and can examine complex analytical units (images, conversations, full user profiles, networks of related entities).
- **Founder Expertise**: Founders spent years countering terrorism, child exploitation, and nation-state actors at Meta and in government, giving them deep domain expertise.
- **System of Record**: Centralizes policies, review teams, enforcement paths, vendors, and AI systems in one operational surface, with full audit trails and compliance documentation.
- **Enterprise-Grade Security**: SOC2, GDPR, and HIPAA compliant, with role-based permissions, SSO, and encrypted data.

## Products & Services
- **Cinder Platform**: A single command center for every safety workflow and tool. Features include real-time detection, quality assurance, access management, and AI-powered workflow builders. Acts as a system of record for all safety operations.
- **Custom AI Agents**: Configurable agents that enforce standards and policies across millions of decisions. They adapt to specific policies, learn continuously, and can examine complex analytical units (images, conversations, full user profiles, networks).
- **Managed Operations**: Expert services for content moderation, case investigation, IP and copyright enforcement, user fraud and account takeover detection, and custom agent development.
- **Data Labeling**: Accurate, AI-ready training data with real-time evaluation and faster turnaround.
- **Applicant Fraud Detection**: Vetting candidates for sensitive roles using the same intelligence applied to abuse detection, integrated directly into an ATS.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Raised $41M in Series B funding (announced in 2024)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Winter 2022 batch, primary partner Brad Flora). Integrates with IWF, Salesforce, StopNCII, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Processes 400M+ events daily, protects 3B+ end-users, automates 94% of human review, saves 100k+ hours, and achieves >97% AI moderation accuracy. The company is scaling rapidly to combat the surge in AI-generated abuse.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Founder Expertise**: Founders spent years countering terrorism, child exploitation, and nation-state actors at Meta and in government, giving them deep domain knowledge and credibility.
- **Agentic AI Infrastructure**: Unlike off-the-shelf classifiers, Cinder’s AI agents adapt to specific policies, learn continuously from mistakes and successes, and can examine complex analytical units (images, conversations, full user profiles, networks).
- **System of Record**: Centralizes policies, review teams, enforcement paths, vendors, and AI systems in one operational surface with full audit trails and compliance documentation.
- **Enterprise-Grade Security**: SOC2, GDPR, and HIPAA compliant, with role-based permissions, SSO, and encrypted data.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling AI Agent Capabilities**: Continuously improving AI agents to outmatch the speed and scale of AI-empowered bad actors.
- **Expanding Platform Integration**: Connecting existing models and third-party tools (IWF, Salesforce, StopNCII) to create a unified safety ecosystem.
- **Hiring in NYC**: Focused on building a strong in-person team in New York City, with team members also across the US and UK/EU.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-Driven Work**: Employees tackle urgent, high-stakes problems like deepfake nudes, child sexual abuse material, AI-generated phishing campaigns, and organized crime. The work is described as "urgent, visible, and high-stakes."
- **Fast-Paced Culture**: The company ships in days, not quarters, and makes decisions with incomplete information. Speed is not optional because adversaries are moving fast with AI.
- **Values**: "Own the Outcome," "Ship Relentlessly," "Mission Over Ego," and "Customer Obsessed." The team is deliberate about building a diverse group with different backgrounds and perspectives.
- **Work Policy**: Hybrid; based in New York City with team members across the US and UK/EU. The company holds at least two all-company gatherings per year and is especially focused on hiring in NYC, with relocation support for the right candidates.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health, vision, and dental coverage; 401(k) with employer matching; paid family leave; flexible paid time off; fully paid commuter benefits; and a fully stocked NYC office with paid lunch and dinner.

## Sources
1. [cinder.ai](https://cinder.ai)
2. [cinder.ai/careers](https://cinder.ai/careers)
3. [cinder.ai/about](https://cinder.ai/about)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/cinder](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cinder)
5. [ycombinator.com/companies/cinder-2](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/cinder-2)

## Other roles at Cinder

- [AI/ML Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-ml-engineer-cinder-new-york-v5cccq6293na) — New York, NY
- [Senior Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-designer-cinder-new-york-73f5w202gc5d) — New York, NY
- [General Application](https://feeny.ai/job/general-application-cinder-san-francisco-djjnj0tzd8rn) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY / London, United Kingdom
- [Senior Product Manager, Trust & Safety](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-trust-safety-cinder-new-york-pyb0f1hvjtrm) — New York, NY
- [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-cinder-new-york-n5q6k5r38kwd) — New York, NY
- [Enterprise Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-cinder-new-york-rc51enk4vrz7) — New York, NY
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