About the company
Thunderbird is one of the world’s most trusted open-source email applications, empowering more than 20 million people globally. At MZLA, the team behind Thunderbird, we build privacy-respecting communication and productivity tools that help people manage their digital lives while staying in control of their data.
Responsibilities
- Lead engineering execution by clarifying priorities, ownership, timelines, risks, dependencies, and quality expectations
- Manage engineers and contractors, including coaching, feedback, prioritization, performance support, and team development
- Stay close to the codebase by contributing code, reviewing technical work, evaluating tradeoffs, and helping the team maintain momentum and quality
- Partner with technical and product leadership to turn product direction, AI strategy, user experience goals, and technical priorities into coordinated engineering plans
- Establish planning, review, release, and follow-through practices that improve predictability and reduce bottlenecks
- Maintain high standards for code quality, testing, documentation, reliability, security awareness, maintainability, and release readiness
- Build strong product and architectural context across AI-enabled workflows, integrations, local-first or customer-controlled architectures, and release requirements
- Partner across product, design, enterprise-facing teams, and technical leadership to balance speed, user experience, privacy, quality, enterprise readiness, and long-term sustainability
- Lead hiring, onboarding, and resource planning as the Thunderbolt engineering team grows
- Help Thunderbolt scale from an incubation-stage product into a reliable, enterprise-ready open-source AI product
Requirements
- 15+ years of professional software development experience, including significant experience in senior engineering leadership or complex product delivery roles
- 5+ years of experience managing technical teams, including senior engineers or senior individual contributors
- A track record of leading a team that shipped polished, top-tier products held to a genuine standard of craft
- Strong ability to translate ambiguous product and technical direction into clear plans, ownership models, and delivery momentum
- Technical fluency with AI-enabled products, including the ability to evaluate tradeoffs across areas such as LLM applications, RAG workflows, agents, enterprise search, automation, on-device AI, or AI evaluation
- Demonstrated experience delivering complex applications across multiple platforms, such as desktop, web, and mobile, using technologies such as Tauri, Electron, React Native, or comparable frameworks
- Experience with enterprise software, regulated environments, or similarly complex technical products, including security, privacy, compliance readiness, administration, integrations, and customer-controlled deployment models
- Practical experience with local-first, offline-capable, self-hosted, hybrid, on-premise, air-gapped, or other customer-controlled product architectures, including tradeoffs