Principal Engineering Manager – Core Services

[ABOUT ISTARI DIGITAL]

Istari is a digital engineering software company enabling our customers to turn the physical world into the digital to accomplish their specific mission or business objectives.

Istari was founded with the vision of making open, scalable digital engineering ecosystems a reality – where new technologies and systems are created digitally, free from the real-world constraints of costs and schedules. We are creating the world’s best engineering model sharing platform, allowing our customers to simply and securely integrate their models across different engineering disciplines, organizations, and security levels.

At Istari, we are passionate about our mission of creating the world's first open and scalable industrial metaverse. Whether our customers are designing prototypes, performing virtual testing, or training AI and autonomy for complex systems, we know that going digital will save them time, resources, and reduce their environmental impact.  

While we are a distributed team with most team-members working remotely, we place an emphasis on staying connected and collaborative, prioritizing in-person opportunities to build trust as a team. At Istari, we still believe that trust is best built in-person. To do this, we have an engineering headquarters in Cambridge, MA for focused technical development and several times per year we gather for an off-site that allows us to develop our professional skills and our team relationships.

[VALUES]

At Istari, we live by our values, which include:

Purposeful Autonomy

We value letting people self-organize and self-motivate. 

Our flat structure and lack of meeting clutter are meant to empower individuals and teams to be proactive.

Our autonomy is measured, goal-oriented, and results-driven – not meandering.

Clear objectives help us prioritize our time.

Smart Transparency

We believe in honest-but-kind communication, transparency, and open-door policies.

We love learning about challenges and tackling them early, not hearing good or bad news late.

We share work-in-progress across our team. 

Fast feedback keeps autonomy purposeful.

Continual Curiosity

At Istari, we love learning to do things ourselves.

We ask, read, share, teach – even watch YouTube videos – to learn new skills to solve problems.

When we make breakthroughs, we write them down.   

Writing focuses ideas, helps us learn, and helps us share.

Equal Opportunity

Istari is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran status, or disability status.

We are seeking an experienced Principal Engineering Manager to lead our Core Services team — the engineers building the foundational backend services that power our self-hosted platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, Mentor & Grow: Manage and empower a high-performing team of Python engineers focused on developing and maintaining core backend systems.
• Technical Guidance: Drive the architecture and technical strategy for building scalable, reliable, and maintainable services.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with Product, Platform, and Infrastructure teams to align priorities, synchronize on the roadmap, and ensure timely, high-quality deliveries.
• Release Ownership: Oversee the end-to-end release process and operational support for core services—especially for our self-hosted deployments.
• Quality & Reliability: Ensure systems meet the highest standards of performance, reliability, and customer integration needs, with particular focus on model servicing and critical backend workflows.
• Continuous Improvement: Identify opportunities for process improvements, automation, and adoption of best practices in DevOps and service delivery.

Required Qualifications

• Leadership Experience: Proven track record of successfully managing, mentoring, and scaling backend engineering teams, ideally in fast-paced and distributed environments.
• Technical Expertise: Exceptional proficiency in Python and a thorough understanding of modern backend and service-oriented architectures.
• Platform Delivery: Experience overseeing self-hosted or hybrid (on-prem/cloud) software delivery, including robust release and support pipelines.
• Collaboration: Strong cross-functional communication skills with the ability to drive alignment and influence across engineering, product, and operations.
• Operational Ownership: Familiarity with monitoring, deployment, and operational support within production environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Expertise in implementing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• Familiarity with observability, logging, and performance monitoring tools

BENEFITS

We offer highly competitive benefits, including:

Health and Family

- Medical/Dental/Vision

- Employee Premiums are 100% Company Paid

- Life Insurance

- Flexible Work Hours 

- Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO) with federal government holidays

Financial

- Competitive Compensation 

- 401k 

- Company Stock Options

- Home Office Setup Budget

Learning

- Reimbursement for approved trainings and subscriptions

- Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Note - some benefits are not available to interns or contractors.

Thank you for your interest in Istari. Expect to hear back from us soon with next steps.