Manager, Engineering

This is a work-from-office / In-Office role based in our Hyderabad, India location.

About the team
Core Engineering builds the firmware and cloud platform that Plume's next-generation architecture is built on. We deliver the Plume Firmware Agent (PFA) across three reference platforms — RDK-B, prplOS / prplMesh, and OpenWRT / OpenSync — The highly scalable cloud core manages a fleet of connected devices over standards-based protocols.

About the role
We're hiring an Engineering Manager to lead one of Core Engineering's delivery teams. This is a hands-on-adjacent people-leadership role: you own the health, growth and output of a team of roughly 10-30 firmware, backend and QA engineers, and you are close enough to the technology to make real calls on scope, sequencing and trade-offs.
You will not be the only voice in the room. Core runs with technical leads, TPMs, product owners and QA leads across multiple regions, and the manager who succeeds here is the one who makes that distributed system work.

What you'll do:

Lead the team

• Manage, coach and grow a globally distributed team of firmware, cloud and QA engineers; run 1:1s, career development, performance and compensation cycles.
• Own hiring for your team end to end — sourcing partnership, interview loop design, closing, and onboarding that gets new engineers productive on a complex embedded + cloud stack.
• Build a culture where code review, design review and demos are collaborative rather than transactional — our review norms deliberately keep PRs open for cross-region input, and that only works if managers protect it.

Own delivery

• Drive sprint planning, review, demo and retrospective for your team on the CORE board; keep the backlog groomed, parented and honestly estimated.
• Take quarterly product requirements through grooming into epics and stories, in partnership with Product Management, Product Owners and the TPM — and push back early when scope, dependencies or capacity don't add up.
• Own release readiness for your area across Alpha, Beta and GA: entry/exit criteria, blocker triage, validation coverage, and a clear-eyed status your leadership can act on.
• Track and unblock cross-team dependencies with Product Engineering, Integration Engineering, Cloud/CSS, DevOps and InfoSec.

Own technical direction with your leads

• Partner with technical leads and architects on platform strategy — the move from a stateful, driver-coupled OpenSync design toward stateless, standards-compliant, SDK-conformant operation over USP.
• Make and defend architectural trade-offs across three device platforms and the cloud services above them, including what gets upstreamed versus carried downstream.
• Raise the engineering bar on the things that quietly decide velocity: build times, branch hygiene, test automation, flaky testbeds, and observability.

What we're looking for:

Leadership Skills

• 12+ years in software engineering with 3+ years managing engineers directly, including hiring and performance management.
• Strong technical grounding in embedded Linux networking — Wi-Fi/networking firmware, an embedded build system (Yocto/OpenWrt/OpenEmbedded), C, and debugging on real hardware — or in distributed cloud services with genuine fluency in the device side.
• Demonstrated ownership of a release train: you have shipped firmware or platform software into production at scale; with QA and release gates you were accountable for.
• Experience leading a distributed team across time zones, and the operating discipline that requires — written communication, asynchronous decision-making, and deliberate inclusion of remote colleagues.
• Comfort operating in a matrixed organisation with technical leads, TPMs and product owners you influence but don't manage.

Technical Skills

• Direct experience with one or more of RDK-B, prplOS/prplMesh, or OpenSync/OpenWrt.
• Working knowledge of Broadband Forum TR-369 (USP) and TR-181, and/or Wi-Fi Alliance EasyMesh.
• Background in the CPE / broadband gateway ecosystem — ODM and chipset vendor SDKs, operator certification, interop testing.
• Familiarity with the surrounding toolchain: Jenkins, GitHub-based workflows, Artifactory, containerised services, Kubernetes/EKS, MQTT, PKI and certificate management.
• Experience with test automation for embedded systems (e.g. Boardfarm, TDK, cloudless test harnesses) and with managing QA as a first-class discipline rather than an afterthought.
• Exposure to Wi-Fi 6/6E/7, MLO, and mesh performance work.