Role overview

Vanta helps organizations build and demonstrate trust through continuous security monitoring and verification. As Engineering Manager for App Primitives, you will lead the team responsible for the foundational shared infrastructure that every product team at Vanta depends on—including comments, notifications, event logs, feature flags, and task management systems. This role combines technical leadership with team development, giving you authority to shape platform direction and grow a high-performing engineering team.

Key responsibilities

Lead and expand the App Primitives team while managing hiring decisions, team health, delivery outcomes, and the career development of senior engineers and technical leaders.
Establish the strategy and roadmap for Vanta’s shared product primitives infrastructure, including the comments system, notifications platform, event logging, feature flag management, and task workflows.
Define and maintain clear interface models between App Primitives systems and product teams, ensuring other teams can build quickly and securely without managing underlying infrastructure.
Work directly with product engineering leaders across the company to understand developer needs, identify bottlenecks in shared systems, and prioritize investments that increase team velocity.
Set technical direction for a full-stack team spanning data models, backend services, and UI primitives, demonstrating strong technical judgment to earn the confidence of senior engineers.
Manage dependencies across teams and balance stakeholder expectations across multiple concurrent initiatives with significant autonomy.

Requirements

At least five years of engineering experience with a minimum of two years actively managing engineering teams, including proven success developing senior engineers and technical leads.
Direct experience leading platform teams, shared services, or product infrastructure teams where your team’s output serves as the foundation for other teams’ work.
Technical depth across the full stack, particularly in backend systems, shared data models, and API design, enabling substantive engagement with your team’s technical decisions.
Demonstrated strength in cross-functional collaboration with product, design, and engineering leaders to establish ownership boundaries and drive alignment.
Documented track record of recruiting senior engineers in competitive markets and cultivating a team culture that people want to join.
Experience managing multi-team dependencies and delivering multiple workstreams concurrently with minimal oversight.
Regular use of AI tools in daily work to enhance productivity, combined with active learning and sound judgment to maintain quality standards.

What makes this role worth considering

You will work with a kind and talented team at Vanta where many contributors bring diverse backgrounds beyond security expertise. The App Primitives team operates at the core of the platform, directly enabling every other engineering team’s productivity—making your technical and leadership decisions immediately impactful across the entire organization.