Software Engineering Manager - Hands-On & Product-Focused

About the Role

Tipalti is building an AI-native product to help with end of month accounts. Today, closing the books takes 5–6 accountants roughly 14 working days, chasing down discrepancies across spreadsheets, payroll systems, invoices, and disconnected data sources. This product is being built from scratch to automate large parts of that reconciliation work using AI, not as an add-on to an existing process, but as the product's core design principle from day one.

This is a hands-on Engineering Manager role: writing code, shaping product direction, talking to customers, and managing two exceptional engineers. This is not a role for someone who wants to manage from a distance. You'll be in the discovery calls, in the codebase, and in the room when the team decides what to build next.

The team operates with very few conventional handoffs between product, design, engineering, and customer-facing work. You'll be expected to run it that way too: make decisions with incomplete information, move fast, and treat mistakes as inputs rather than setbacks.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow a team of 2 engineers, staying hands-on as a contributor while providing the direction and developing and metoring.
• Own a substantial part of the Close product end to end from discovery through implementation to delivery.
• Talk directly to customers and accountants, running discovery, demoing work live, and turning what you hear into a working product.
• Build and ship, personally contributing to the codebase and to the AI workflows at the heart of the product.
• Investigate real accounting processes (payroll, invoices, expenses, deferred amounts, reconciliation) across US and European operations to find where AI can remove manual, cross-referencing work.
• Represent the team's progress to stakeholders and sponsors, since the team operates with minimal formal reporting structure.
• Help define how a small, autonomous, AI-native team should operate at Tipalti, in a way that could be adopted more broadly if the model succeeds.

What You'll Need (Must-Haves)

• Genuine hands-on engineering ability. You'll be writing code and building AI workflows yourself, not just directing others.
• Real people-management or team-leadership experience, you know how to coach, unblock, and grow two engineers while still building.
• Extreme autonomy. This team doesn't have conventional handoffs between product, design, and engineering, you need to be comfortable making calls with incomplete information.
• Product instincts and customer comfort. You should be genuinely energized by talking to customers, running discovery, and demoing work live.
• Explicit, hands-on enthusiasm for AI using it as a core part of how you build and work, not as an occasional productivity aid.
• Willingness to go deep on accounting. You don't need an accounting background, but you do need to be curious enough to learn payroll, reconciliation, and regional accounting differences in real depth.
• A bias to ship. Comfortable delivering in small, incremental slices and iterating in public rather than waiting for a complete solution.

Nice-to-Haves

• Prior experience building a product or team from scratch (0→1).
• Prior experience as an engineering manager or tech lead of a small team, especially one that also shipped products..
• Accounting, bookkeeping, or fintech domain experience.
• Experience working close to customers, onboarding, or sales functions.
• Recent, hands-on experimentation with AI coding and workflow tools.

Tech & Working Context

• No fixed language or framework requirement as the team optimizes for shipping, not a specific stack.
• AI tooling and AI-workflow implementation sit at the center of the work.
• The product integrates with Tipalti's existing accounts payable data and related financial systems (e.g., payroll data sources).
• Legal and regulatory requirements mean some accounting steps will always require human sign-off — part of the job is designing AI workflows that respect that.