Senior Manager, Software Engineering (Authentication)

About this role

Who We Are

Pindrop is the Real Human + Right Human® Identity Trust Platform for the AI era. As AI-driven fraud and deepfakes erode trust in digital communication, Pindrop delivers continuous identity verification and deepfake detection across voice, video, and digital interactions in real time.

Enterprises rely on Pindrop to secure billions of high-risk customer interactions each year, including top U.S. banks, as well as leading insurers and healthcare providers. Powered by models trained on more than 1.5 billion real-world interactions annually and protected by 300+ patents, Pindrop restores trust while reducing fraud, lowering operational costs, and improving customer experience.

Recognized by TIME as one of the Top 10 Most Influential Software Companies of 2026 and by Inc. for Best in Business for Innovation, Pindrop is backed by leading investors including Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, and CapitalG.

What you’ll do

As Senior Manager, Software Engineering for Authentication, you will lead a critical part of Pindrop’s Passport platform. You will own the technical and people leadership for the teams building and operating the high-performance cloud services behind real-time voice authentication and identity verification. This role is centered on operational excellence, system stability, and strong engineering leadership in a high-stakes environment with strict latency and reliability expectations.

More specifically, you will:

• Lead and develop engineering managers, senior engineers, and emerging technical leaders across the Authentication area, building strong ownership, healthy operating rhythms, and clear growth paths.

• Translate product and engineering strategy into a clear technical roadmap, execution plan, and operating model for Authentication.

• Improve the reliability, scalability, and operational health of cloud-native, API-based distributed systems that power customer-facing authentication journeys.

• Drive predictable, high-quality delivery across multiple concurrent initiatives by improving prioritization, planning, cross-team coordination, and execution discipline.

• Raise the bar on architecture, observability, testing, incident response, postmortems, and engineering standards across Authentication services.

• Partner closely with Product, Research, Security, Platform, and adjacent engineering teams to align roadmap priorities, technical investments, and customer outcomes.

• Own metrics that improve delivery health, system performance, team effectiveness, and on-call sustainability.

• Act as a senior technical escalation point during complex customer issues and production incidents, and drive durable follow-through after incidents occur.

• Guide how Authentication safely consumes and operationalizes AI/ML-backed trust signals, model outputs, and automation in production systems.

• Foster a culture of accountability, inclusion, learning, and calm execution under pressure.

Who you are

• You are strategically minded and know how to turn complex technical and business goals into clear, executable plans.

• You are a relationship-driven engineering leader who builds trust across teams and keeps people aligned through ambiguity and change.

• You are technically credible and stay close enough to architecture, delivery, and operations to make strong decisions and coach others effectively.

• You care deeply about engineering quality, team health, operational resilience, and creating an environment where people can do their best work.

• You are calm, structured, and accountable in high-pressure situations, especially when customer-facing systems are under stress.

• You are thoughtful about using AI as a force multiplier, while applying strong judgment, validation, and human oversight.

Your skill-set Must-haves:

• 8–12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience building and operating distributed backend systems and APIs in production.

• 3–5+ years of engineering leadership experience, including experience leading through managers and/or senior technical leads.

• Strong technical depth in cloud-native architecture, microservices, observability, CI/CD, and modern engineering practices across AWS and/or GCP.

• Proven experience improving reliability, execution, and engineering standards for customer-facing, high-availability systems.

• Hands-on background in backend technologies such as Go and/or Python, plus strong understanding of data stores and service design for low-latency systems.

• Strong cross-functional partnership skills, including experience working with Product, Security, Support, Customer Success, and other engineering teams.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience in authentication, identity, fraud prevention, risk engines, or other security-sensitive product domains.

• Familiarity with modern IAM concepts and standards such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, RBAC/ABAC, or related policy-driven access patterns.

• Experience partnering with Research, MLOps, or data teams to productionize model outputs, risk signals, or other AI/ML-enabled capabilities.

• Experience leading teams operating multi-cloud services with meaningful on-call responsibility and incident load.

What’s in it for you

This is a high-impact opportunity to lead systems that matter at the center of how Pindrop verifies identity and protects high-stakes customer interactions in real time. You will help shape a critical engineering area where reliability, trust, customer experience, and AI-driven innovation all intersect. You will partner with strong product, research, and engineering peers while influencing both near-term execution and longer-term technical direction. If you want to lead a team working on hard distributed-systems problems in a space evolving quickly under the pressure of adversarial AI, this is that opportunity.

What we offer (US ONLY)

As a part of Pindrop, you’ll have a direct impact on our growing list of products and the future of

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