Engineering Group Manager

Description Optibus is the AI-powered platform that plans and operates public transportation in 450+ cities worldwide. At the heart of our platform sit our three core products — Planning, Scheduling, and Rostering — the products that turn millions of constraints into the schedules that move drivers, vehicles, and passengers every day. We're looking for an Engineering Group Manager to lead this group. Reporting to the VP of R&D, you'll own the engineering execution, architecture, and technical direction of the products that define what Optibus is. You'll lead a group of full-stack team leads and engineers building large-scale, complex SaaS products on a cloud-native platform, working closely with our Algorithms group. This is not a 2024 group manager role. We are not hiring someone whose day is meetings, status reports, and approvals. We are hiring a hands-on technical leader who codes, designs systems, drives architecture, leverages AI as a force multiplier, and is measured by impact rather than headcount. What You'll Own R&D leadership partnership. You're a key member of the R&D leadership team, actively shaping departmental strategy and driving high-level decisions across the organization — not just running your own group. The core of the product. Engineering ownership of Planning, Scheduling, and Rostering — the products at the center of the Optibus platform, used by transit agencies and operators worldwide. Architecture and technical direction. You set the technical bar. You participate in design, review architecture, write PRDs, and dive into code reviews when it matters. The hardest problems land on your desk. A group of team leads and engineers. You'll mentor team leads, grow engineers, and build a small, sharp, high-leverage organization rather than a large one. Delivery, quality, and velocity. You drive the engineering processes that ship a high-quality product on production-grade SaaS — fast, with low defect rates, and with continuous improvement. AI-native engineering. You leverage AI agents and automation to multiply the output of your group — both in how the team builds software and in what we build into the product. Cross-functional partnership. Tight collaboration with Product, Design, Algorithms, and Customer-facing teams to translate complex transit-domain needs into shipping software. Who You Are We are looking for what we call a Hands-on Engineering Leader. Specifically: IC Leader at Heart: You actively contribute to architecture and code, staying close to the system to maintain technical trust and sharp judgment. AI & Automation Driven: You treat AI as an operating model, using agentic workflows to multiply throughput and drive engineering efficiency. Master of Evolution: You have a proven track record of stabilizing mature codebases and leading incremental modernization without halting delivery. Short Chain of Command: You analyze raw data yourself and dive deep into the stack to shrink the gap between insight and action. Ego-aside Leadership: You prioritize impact over headcount, acting as the group’s engine and owning a collaborative, high-standard culture. Requirements 5+ years managing software engineering teams, including managing team leads (i.e. managing managers). 12+ years of hands-on production experience building SaaS products, with deep proficiency in modern stacks such as Python, Node.js, React, or equivalent. Strong, current technical depth: you can lead architecture discussions, review designs, and contribute to code-level decisions for complex distributed systems. Demonstrated experience designing and operating large-scale production SaaS systems with non-trivial complexity — deep domain logic, large data, or heavy product surface area. Hands-on experience leading code modernization in mature, large codebases — paying down technical debt while continuing to ship, and driving incremental architecture evolution over rewrites. Hands-on fluency with AI development tools and agentic workflows — and a clear point of view on how to use them to multiply engineering output. Strong people leader: you have built, grown, and retained engineering organizations, and you have a track record of developing team leads into stronger leaders. Pragmatic delivery and quality mindset; comfortable making the trade-off calls. BSc in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related field — or equivalent experience shipping production-grade products at this level. Fluent English and Hebrew. Tel Aviv area, hybrid. Preferred Experience leading full-stack engineering teams that build products around complex algorithmic or optimization domains (working alongside dedicated algorithms / research teams, rather than owning the algorithms themselves). Background in data-intensive SaaS platforms with deep domain logic. Familiarity with AWS or another major cloud environment, and modern cloud-native architectures. Experience in mobility, transportation, logistics, or another operations-heavy domain. Experience operating in a strong agile / continuous-delivery environment with mature Product partnership.