COMPANY OVERVIEW
Realm http://realmalliance.com builds AI for the mining industry. We integrate with existing mine infrastructure — cameras, SCADA systems, drones, and data repositories — to predict equipment failures, detect unsafe behaviors, and optimize operations. Our platform deploys intelligence in various ways to improve productivity and safety — monitoring PPE compliance via computer vision, optimizing froth flotation processes, analyzing longwall shearer performance, tracking MSHA citation patterns, and more.
Our founders started their careers at Palantir before going on to build Blend Labs (publicly traded fintech, founded as CTO) and Even (acquired by Walmart). Our leadership team brings experience from Uber, Metropolis, and other high-bar organizations. We're a small, senior team that ships daily to production mines.
AI isn't just our product — it's how we build. We're an AI-first engineering team that uses the latest models and tooling throughout our development process, moving faster and at higher quality than traditional teams our size.
Our culture values high agency, deep ownership, collaboration, and autonomy across a fully remote workforce. Teams here move quickly and make meaningful contributions to a product that shapes global industrial outcomes.
The role
We're looking for an Engineering Manager who leads with people first. You'll be one of the first engineering leaders at Realm, working directly with our CEO to build a world-class engineering organization from the ground up. This is a rare opportunity: the chance to shape culture, process, and technical direction at a company that is genuinely changing how the world's mines operate.
What sets you apart isn't just your management track record — it's your reputation. Great engineers want to work with you. They've seen what you can do, they've been part of something you helped build, and they want to do it again.
If you're the kind of leader people follow from company to company, we want to meet you. You know how to hire, how to grow people, and how to build a team that's more than the sum of its parts. You create environments where engineers do their best work — and you've done it before.
What you'll do
- Lead and grow a team of backend, full-stack, and AI/ML engineers building real-time systems for active mining operations
- Recruit aggressively — bring your network, identify top talent, and build a team that raises the collective bar
- Define and uphold engineering standards: code quality, testing, CI/CD, system design, security
- Partner with our CEO on engineering organization design, roadmap prioritization, and long-term technical strategy
- Own the team's delivery end-to-end — from sprint planning to production deploys that run at real mines
- Work directly with users, operators, and the product team to translate real-world industrial challenges into high-impact engineering work
- Foster a culture of ownership, craft, and collaboration on a remote team where trust is the foundation
Experience & skills
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep software engineering fundamentals — data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, system design
- 2+ years managing engineers with a track record of growing careers and raising performance bars
- Strong individual contributor background — you've written production code at scale, not just managed people who do
- Confidence across the stack: backend services, APIs, databases, infrastructure, and at least one domain of AI/ML or computer vision
- Proficiency with agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and an AI-first development mindset
- Startup experience — you've been an early engineering leader and know what it takes to build from scratch
Leadership & team building
- An established reputation — engineers who have worked with you want to work with you again, and you're prepared to bring them in
- A genuine network of top-tier engineers who trust you and want to build with you — recruiting and getting to build a team ground up is a big part of this role and something that excites you
- Strong hiring instincts and a genuine passion for recruiting: you know great engineers when you see them, and you know how to close them
- Ability to give direct, constructive feedback and hold a high bar without sacrificing team morale
- Experience building remote engineering cultures where ownership, communication, and autonomy replace process overhead
Engineering judgment & quality
- Strong alignment on code quality, architecture, and technical debt — and the diplomacy to land them on a team of strong opinions
- Appreciation for continuous delivery, automated testing, and clean abstractions
- Ability to distinguish between premature optimization and genuine technical risk
Mission alignment
- Genuine belief that technology can make industrial operations safer, more efficient, and more humane — you don't need to be sold on the mission, you're energized by it
- Comfort with the ambiguity, urgency, and accountability that come with building software that runs at active mines
Eligibility
- US citizen or permanent resident, based in the US
Process
- Recruiter screen (15 mins)
- Intro call with Eugene, CEO & Cofounder / hiring manager (20 mins)
- Take home tech assessment (1hr)
- Technical with Eng (1hr) + Chat with Head of Ops (30 mins)
- Chat with Eng (30 mins) + Chat with Designer (30 mins)
- Final Technical with Eugene (1.5hrs) + Chat with Cofounder Myles (45 mins)