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 tea [... source excerpt omitted ...] nths. 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 engin [... source excerpt omitted ...] uct 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 exi