Senior Engineering Manager, AI Product (Thunderbolt)

<p><strong>Why Thunderbird?</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thunderbird is one of the world’s most trusted open-source email applications, empowering more than 20 million people globally. At MZLA, the team behind Thunderbird, we build privacy-respecting communication and productivity tools that help people manage their digital lives while staying in control of their data.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are open source by design. Our products are developed transparently and in collaboration with a global community of contributors, and that same spirit shapes how we work: collaboratively, inclusively, and with a shared commitment to putting users first.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are a small but growing company of 60+ people distributed across seven countries. As Thunderbird evolves beyond a single desktop application, we are expanding across desktop, mobile, paid services, and new product experiences that help people and organizations work more effectively without giving up control to big tech ecosystems.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our revenue model combines user donations, which help keep Thunderbird’s apps freely available, with paid services that cover the costs of hosted offerings while supporting long-term sustainability and continued innovation.</span></p> <p><strong>A note about MZLA and Mozilla: </strong>MZLA Technologies Corporation is the nonprofit-owned company behind Thunderbird and part of the Mozilla family. MZLA is separate from Mozilla Corporation and has its own compensation programs, benefits, and employment policies.</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">To learn more, visit </span><a href="http://www.thunderbird.net"><span style="font-weight: 400;">www.thunderbird.net and www.thunderbolt.io.</span></a></p> <p><strong>The opportunity</strong></p> <p><strong>Thunderbolt</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is an open-source, cross-platform AI product initiative from the team behind Thunderbird. It is being </span><strong>built around a clear principle: people and organizations should be able to use AI while staying in control of their data,</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> infrastructure, model choices, and long-term options. Thunderbolt is designed to support flexible deployment models, integrations with AI tools and workflows, and use cases across desktop, web, and mobile.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to </span><strong>lead engineering execution, people management, and operating practices for Thunderbolt as it moves from R&amp;D incubation into a more mature product and enterprise development phase</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">. This role will help the team define what production-ready means at this stage: stronger release discipline, clearer ownership, higher user-facing product quality, stronger engineering practices, and a more scalable operating model.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This is a </span><strong>hands-on technical management</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span><strong>role</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">. The Senior Engineering Manager will manage a senior engineering team, stay </span><strong>closely engaged with the codebase and technical execution</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">, coordinate work across employees, contractors, and technical partners, and help the team deliver a reliable, enterprise-ready open-source AI product. The right person will bring strong people management skills, strong product engineering judgment, and enough technical depth to evaluate engineering work credibly, support architectural and implementation tradeoffs, and help the team keep shipping with quality.</span></p> <p><strong>What you’ll do&nbsp;</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lead engineering execution by clarifying priorities, ownership, timelines, risks, dependencies, and quality expectations.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manage engineers and contractors, including coaching, feedback, prioritization, performance support, and team development.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stay close to the codebase by contributing code, reviewing technical work, evaluating tradeoffs, and helping the team maintain momentum and quality.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Partner with technical and product leadership to turn product direction, AI strategy, user experience goals, and technical priorities into coordinated engineering plans.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Establish planning, review, release, and follow-through practices that improve predictability and reduce bottlenecks.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Maintain high standards for code quality, testing, documentation, reliability, security awareness, maintainability, and release readiness.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Build strong product and architectural context across AI-enabled workflows, integrations, local-first or customer-controlled architectures, and release requirements.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Partner across product, design, enterprise-facing teams, and technical leadership to balance speed, user experience, privacy, quality, enterprise readiness, and long-term sustainability.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lead hiring, onboarding, and resource planning as the Thunderbolt engineering team grows.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Help Thunderbolt scale from an incubation-stage product into a reliable, enterprise-ready open-source AI product.</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>What you bring&nbsp;</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">15+ years of professional software development experience, including significant experience in senior engineering leadership or complex product delivery roles.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">5+ years of experience managing technical teams, including senior engineers or senior individual contributors.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A track record of leading a team that shipped polished, top-tier products held to a genuine standard of craft.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Strong ability to translate ambiguous product and technical direction into clear plans, ownership models, and delivery momentum.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">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.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">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.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience with enterprise software, regulated environments, or similarly complex technical products, including security, privacy, compliance readiness, administration, integrations, and customer-controlled deployment models.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">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.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience improving engineering practices related to technical planning, code review, release readiness, testing, documentation, CI/CD, maintainability, or technical debt management.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Excellent communication skills around technical prioritization, release risk, ownership, quality expectations, and tradeoffs.</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>Bonus points for</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience working in open-source or maintainer-style engineering environments.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience with compliance or security standards such as SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, or similar frameworks.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience helping take a product from zero to one in a startup or new product initiative.</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>What success looks like</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Success in this role means helping Thunderbolt make the leap from promising R&amp;D-stage product to a </span><strong>production-ready, enterprise-grade open-source AI product that security-conscious organizations can deploy with confidence</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Within the first year, the Senior Engineering Manager should help turn a fast-moving early product into a team and engineering system that can scale by helping the team:</span></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Define</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> what “production-ready” means for Thunderbolt and consistently meet that bar.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Create</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the clarity, ownership, and release confidence the team needs to ship quickly and sustainably.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Raise</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the quality of the user-facing product experience while protecting codebase health, maintainability, privacy, and security.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Build</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the lightweight structure needed for a senior team to do its best work without slowing down experimentation.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Help build Thunderbolt for global scale, enterprise adoption, and real-world impact!</strong></li> </ul> <p><strong>Work environment</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This is a<span style="color: rgb(224, 62, 45);"> </span></span><span style="font-weight: 400; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">full-time</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">,</span> fully remote position.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">You’ll work with our passionate staff, open-source community members and partners from all over the globe. Strong communication and documentation skills are essential for effective collaboration across time zones and disciplines.</span></p> <p><strong>Compensation &amp; benefits</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We benchmark our base salaries to local markets and target the 60th percentile of the peer market. The salary ranges for this role are:</span></p> <ul> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">US</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">:</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> $215,000 - $240,000 USD</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Canada</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">:</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> $190,000 - $220,000 CAD</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In addition to competitive salaries, we offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your whole self.</span></p> <p><strong>Work &amp; career</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fully remote work &amp; schedule flexibility</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Company-provided laptop</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Annual bonus program</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Monthly remote work stipend</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Annual professional development stipend</span></li> <li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Access to </span><span style="font-weight: 400; color: rgb(224, 62, 45);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Coursera</span> </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">l</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">earning platform</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Industry conferences</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Company all-hands and team gatherings</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>Rest &amp; play</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">24 days PTO per year (prorated)&nbsp;</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Your birthday</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Year-end company shutdown</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">9 wellbeing days&nbsp;</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Public holidays</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Other paid leave</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Quarterly wellbeing stipend for personal / family activities</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>Health &amp; family</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">401(k) / RRSP</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </span>contributions</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Health, dental, &amp; vision insurance</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Disability insurance</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Life insurance</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Employee assistance program&nbsp;</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Paid parental leave</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Paid sick days&nbsp;</span></li> </ul> <p><strong>Work eligibility</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Applicants must reside in and </span><strong>have permanent work authorization</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for the country location(s) specified in the posting. We are unable to consider applicants outside of these markets at this time. And, we do not provide visa sponsorship.</span></p> <p><strong>How to apply</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Please apply directly through our </span><a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/careers/listings/?team=MZLA/Thunderbird"><span style="font-weight: 400;">career page</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. We carefully review every cover letter and screening question, so take the time to answer each fully.</span><strong> </strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">We value authentic, thoughtful responses that reflect your own experience and perspective. It is fine to use AI tools to polish your writing, but your answers should be your own. </span><strong>Candidates who submit generic or unoriginal AI-generated responses may be disqualified from further consideration.</strong></p> <p><strong>Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">MZLA believes in the value of diverse creative practices and forms of knowledge, and knows diversity, equity and inclusion are crucial to and enrich the company’s core mission. We encourage applications from everyone, including members of all equity-seeking communities, such as (but not limited to) women, racialized and Indigenous persons, persons with disabilities, persons of all sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race (including hairstyle and texture), religion (including religious grooming and dress practices), gender, gender identity, gender expression, color, national origin, pregnancy, ancestry, domestic partner status, disability, sexual orientation, age, genetic predisposition, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, military or veteran status, or any other basis covered by applicable laws. MZLA will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics or any other unlawful behavior, conduct, or purpose.&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We will ensure that qualified individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, as appropriate. Please contact us at</span><strong> </strong><strong>hiringaccommodations@thunderbird.net</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to request accommodation.</span></p> <p>#LI-DNI</p>