Engineering Manager – Guard Foundations (Zürich)
At Lakera, we're building the next generation of GenAI security products empowering developers to ship safely and securely in a world of fast-moving AI. Guard is at the heart of that mission: a developer-first platform for detecting and preventing AI misuse, abuse, and hallucinations.
The Guard Foundations team builds the critical infrastructure that enables Guard to scale with speed, performance, and reliability. This is not just backend engineering it’s about creating the architectural and operational bedrock that accelerates innovation across all Guard teams.
If you’re excited by infrastructure and platform challenges at the intersection of performance, scale, and ML systems and love enabling others to move faster this role is for you.
What you’ll do
As an Engineering Manager for Guard Foundations, you will:
Lead and grow a team of 5–10 engineers focused on infrastructure, performance, and scalability.
Own the core systems that power Guard: observability, feature toggles, config management, rate limiting, auth, caching layers, and more.
Drive engineering excellence: enable high performance across Guard with clean interfaces, high-quality code, great tests, and robust deployments.
Partner with product teams: unblock and accelerate innovation by building reusable infrastructure components, tooling, and abstractions.
Make performance a product feature: reduce latency, optimize throughput, and increase system reliability across the Guard stack.
Coach and grow talent: mentor engineers with empathy and clarity; hire and retain top performers.
Shape long-term direction: work with leadership to define the foundational roadmap for Guard.
What we're looking for
3+ years of engineering management experience, leading platform teams.
Strong systems thinking: you don’t need to code daily, but you think deeply about architecture, performance, and operational resilience.
Track record of building infrastructure that scaled with product growth and enabled developer velocity.
Collaboration skills: you work well with product, design, and engineering peers unblocking and accelerating others.
Bias for action and accountability you move fast, focus on outcomes, and bring clarity in ambiguity.
People-first mindset: you build high-trust, high-performance teams through coaching and care.
Humility, curiosity, and pragmatism: you value impact over ego.