Engineering Manager - Stealth Aviation Safety Intelligence Startup

UP.Labs is hiring a hands-on Engineering Manager for Scout, an AI-powered safety intelligence platform built in partnership with Alaska Airlines. The industry is high-stakes, tightly regulated, and still runs on reactive, form-based reporting.
The core problem: safety teams are fighting yesterday's incidents. Frontline reports pile up faster than analysts can triage them, and the engineering team building the platform to fix this is moving fast toward production scale without the process and compliance foundation that enterprise safety-critical customers require.
We're building the platform that fixes this - replacing slow, dropdown-based reporting with a real-time intelligence layer. Frontline employees report by voice, photo, or text, and Scout classifies, triages, and links related reports across workgroups so analysts spend their time on prevention, not paperwork. Built for aviation compliance (FAA Part 121, Safety Management System workflows), with Alaska Airlines live in production and additional airline customers in pipeline.
As Engineering Manager, you'll lead the development team while staying hands-on with code - splitting off and owning day-to-day team leadership that's currently spread across the existing engineering group. You'll write code, review PRs, and guide architecture, but your biggest impact will be building the process and compliance foundation the team needs as Scout works toward SOC 2 and ISO certifications over the next 18 months. You'll also have access to the UP.Partners ecosystem - product, engineering, design, analytics, legal, talent, finance, and VC - to help accelerate execution.
In this role, you will:

• Lead and grow the development team, balancing hands-on coding and code review with day-to-day team leadership.
• Own engineering process maturity as Scout scales - sprint planning, code review standards, release processes, and documentation.
• Partner closely with the Head of Engineering to build the compliance and process foundation needed for SOC 2 and ISO 27001 over the next 18 months, translating audit and controls requirements into practical engineering workflows.
• Mentor and develop engineers on the team, setting technical standards and supporting career growth.
• Drive best practices around code quality, testing, CI/CD, and documentation across the team.
• Partner with Product and the Head of Engineering to translate roadmap priorities into clear technical plans and sprint execution.
• Help onboard and integrate new engineers as the team grows toward production scale.
• Support incident response and production issues alongside the broader engineering team as needed.

Who you are:

• A hands-on engineering leader who still writes code and reviews PRs, not someone who has moved fully into people management.
• Experienced building or maturing engineering process and compliance readiness - you've been part of driving a team through SOC 2, SOC 1, or ISO 27001, not just working somewhere that had it.
• Comfortable in a lean, fast-moving team without a lot of existing process infrastructure already built.
• A clear communicator who can translate compliance and audit requirements into workflows engineers will actually follow.
• Collaborative - able to work closely with the Head of Engineering, product, and the rest of a small team without a lot of hierarchy.
• Capable of thriving in ambiguous, high-growth startup environments where priorities shift as the product moves from stabilization to scale.

You should have:

• Meaningful experience as an Engineering Manager, Senior Engineering Manager, or hands-on Team Lead/Tech Lead, ideally with some individual contributor tenure before moving into leadership.
• Direct experience helping lead a team through SOC 2, SOC 1, or ISO 27001 readiness or certification - this is the strongest signal for this role.
• Strong backend or full-stack background (TypeScript, JavaScript, Node, React) and the ability to remain hands-on.
• Comfortable operating with a small team and building process from scratch rather than working within an already-mature engineering org.
• Early-stage startup experience is a plus but not required.
• No specific industry background required - aviation, safety, or EHS domain experience is a nice to have, but not a factor for this role.
• Agentic AI or LLM engineering experience
• Experience with Databricks

Why Join Us:

• Lead engineering process and team growth for a platform already live in production with a major airline customer, expanding into additional airline and industry partnerships.
• Build the compliance and process foundation for a company as it moves from stabilization to enterprise scale, with real influence over how the team works.
• Work directly with Scout's Head of Engineering as a key partner in team leadership - not just another report.
• Collaborate with UP.Labs, strategic partners, and investors to drive real impact in aviation and adjacent high-risk industries.
• Earn meaningful equity in a company positioned to transform how high-risk industries prevent catastrophic incidents.
• Remote-friendly. We care about output, not location.

About UP.Labs: We build high-growth technology startups that enable faster, cleaner, and safer movement of people and goods. Our platform is unique in three ways:

• Risk: We reward our entire team and ecosystem of partners with meaningful equity.
• Technology: We build and launch scalable technology products that form the basis for each venture.
• Industry Focus: We stay focused on the underlying fabric of retail mobility.

We work with corporate investors over a multi-year period to launch a portfolio of ventures. Our team is dedicated to the first year of a new venture's life cycle: from ideation to MVP build - and beyond.