About this Engineering Manager, Cloud role at Brain Corp
Brain Corp is a San Diego, California, USA-based AI company creating transformative core technology for the robotics industry. Our purpose is to create autonomous technology that helps the real world work better. Brain's robotic and AI solutions help retailers ensure that the right product is on the right shelf at the right price, in a clean environment. Through the BrainOS® Robotics Platform, which powers the largest global fleet of the Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) in operation in commercial public spaces, Brain Corp delivers insightful and efficient automated solutions in both commercial floor cleaning and inventory management, empowering organizations and their employees to achieve more. Brain Corp currently powers more than 30,000 AMRs, representing the largest fleet of its kind in the world. Brain Corp is funded by the SoftBank Vision Fund, Clearbridge, and Qualcomm Ventures.
Named a top workplace by the San Diego Union Tribune and USA today in 2025, we make life-changing impacts through innovation, helping workers globally unlock their abilities in orchestration with intelligent machines.
Position Summary:
Brain Corp runs one of the world's largest fleets of autonomous mobile robots, and the Cloud Platform is the nervous system that connects all of it. We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead that team and the engineers who build it. This is the cloud backbone behind every Brain robot in the field: it ingests data from a global fleet, powers fleet operations and customer-facing applications, and is the platform every Brain product is built on.
This is a builder's seat at a pivotal moment. You'll lead a team of strong cloud engineers, own the platform's reliability and roadmap, and shape the architecture for Brain's next phase of scale, with the mandate and the executive backing to grow the team, raise the bar, and turn the cloud platform into a product others build on. If you want real ownership, high leverage, and a team that ships things robots in the real world depend on, this is it.
The Engineering Manager, Cloud is a hands-on leader. People leadership and delivery are the core of the job, and you'll stay close enough to the technology to make sound architectural calls and earn the trust of senior engineers. You'll partner closely with the platform's Principal and Staff technical leaders and bring steady, energizing leadership to a team in a period of growth.
Essential Job Functions:
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team, fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and high-quality engineering execution
- Drive high-performance results through regular coaching and performance reviews that support long-term career growth, and build the next layer of technical leadership within the team
- Own hiring, onboarding, and ramp-to-impact across the Cloud Platform team, building the bench through a period of senior hiring and growth
- Own roadmap execution, the sprint and release cadence, and on-time delivery of cloud platform capabilities across the Robot and Customer interfaces
- Define and execute the team roadmap aligned with company and Platform strategy, balancing near-term execution against long-term platform health
- Navigate high-level tradeoffs between competing priorities (performance, schedule, cost, reliability, scalability) to meet commitments without compromising quality
- Own production reliability, on-call rotation, and incident response, driving toward clear service-level objectives and durable fixes over short-term patches
- Own cloud cost management and efficiency, partnering with engineering and finance to keep platform spend aligned with the business
- Partner with the platform's Principal and Staff technical leaders on architecture and technical strategy, and make the call when a call is needed
- Provide architectural guidance for complex, high-availability distributed systems to ensure reliability, scalability, and security across the platform
- Partner cross-functionally with Platform, Apps, Autonomy, Product, and the GTM teams who consume cloud services, and represent Cloud in planning and prioritization
- Directly contribute to development activities to achieve commitments as required, and perform other duties and projects as assigned
Education and/or Work Experience Requirements:
- BS or MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in cloud, platform, or backend systems, including 2-3 years in a formal people-management role leading engineering teams
- Proven track record delivering and operating production cloud services at scale (reliability, on-call, cost), ideally in robotics, autonomous systems, IoT, or large-scale distributed platforms
- Strong experience with Agile methodologies and the full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics:
- Proven ability to build, grow, and retain high-performing engineering teams, develop the next layer of leaders, and raise the delivery and operational bar
- Strong prioritization and trade-off decision-making across competing demands (performance, schedule, cost, reliability, scalability), with the judgment to set direction in a fast-moving, high-ownership, ambiguous environment
- Exceptional communication skills, capable of engaging and aligning both technical and executive audiences
- Strong cloud-platform technical foundation: distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and APIs, with enough depth to lead architecture conversations and earn the trust of senior engineers (GCP preferred; AWS or Azure also valued)
- Working grounding in modern cloud-native patterns (containers, orchestration, infrastructure-as-code) and in operating production services, managed databases, and reliability practice (SLOs/SLIs, observability, on-call, cost)
- Ability to translate market and product needs into engineering priorities, and to influence architectural standards and best practices across the organization
- Demonstrated ability to build and lead teams using GenAI tooling and workflows, fostering a culture of GenAI adoption across the software development lifecycle (e.g., coding, debugging, testing, documentation) to improve engineering velocity, quality, and scalability while maintaining strong engineering rigor
- US-based, with timezone and working-hours alignment to a predominantly US team and close partnership with EU-based technical leaders
Things that make a difference:
- MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
- Experience in robotics, IoT, fleet management, or hardware-connected (edge-to-cloud) ecosystems
- Hands-on familiarity with GCP services (e.g., GKE, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery) and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi)
- Experience migrating to or standing up managed databases (e.g., AlloyDB / Postgres at scale)
- Experience building or leading platform organizations through periods of rapid scale or organizational change
- Familiarity with SOC2 / ISO 27001-compliant systems and secure cloud practices
Physical Demands:
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. Essential functions may require maintaining the physical condition necessary for sitting, walking or standing for periods of time; operating a computer and keyboard; use of hands to finger and grasp; talk and hear at normal room levels; visual acuity to determine the accuracy, neatness, and thoroughness of the work assigned or to make general observations of facilities or structures; push or pull up to 20 pounds.
Work Environment:
The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate. Employees are exposed to the typical office environment with computers, printers and telephones.
Salary Range:
The anticipated salary range for candidates who will work in San Diego, California is $220,203.00 to $275,254.00. The final salary offered to a successful candidate will be dependent on several factors that may include but are not limited to the type and length of experience within the job, type and length of experience within the industry, education, etc. Brain Corp is a multi-state employer and this salary range may not reflect positions that work in other states.
In addition to base pay, our competitive total rewards package consists of:
- A discretionary annual target bonus
- Stock options
- 401(k) plan with match (no waiting period and immediate vesting)
- Comprehensive suite of insurance benefits for employees (and their families) to include a variety of medical plan options (including an HSA with employer contribution), dental, vision, life and disability insurance, Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Legal/Identity support plans, pet insurance.
- Access to Flexible Spending Accounts (Medical and Dependent Care)
- Generous paid time off including flexible vacation, Paid Sick Leave, time off for volunteering in the community, 10 paid company holidays, and a winter company shutdown
Additional Perks include:
- Daily on-site lunch available in the San Diego office
- On-campus gym including pool and tennis courts in the San Diego office
- Opportunities to connect with colleagues including monthly game nights, hikes, wellness challenges, and community events
- Internal continuous learning events
- Opportunities to share your own interests and hobbies with the Company