Technical Lead Manager at Instabase
San Francisco, CA
$230,000–$270,000from the description
Jul 20, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A player-coach engineering role leading a small team (3–5 engineers) building an agentic AI platform that combines document understanding with sandboxed code execution and tool orchestration. The bulk of the work is hands-on: designing stateful multi-turn agent loops, secure runtime sandboxes, MCP-based tool integrations, and evaluation frameworks. Suited to a senior engineer with production LLM/agentic systems experience who also has some team leadership background.
Senior level · 8+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Bachelor's required · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 15 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (computer and information systems managers). range 9–25
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $238,011 (middle half $208,323–$320,108). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
This role is a genuine hybrid between a people manager (11-3021) and a hands-on senior IC (15-1252). The posting explicitly frames it as 60–70% hands-on engineering and 30–40% leadership over a team of 3–5 engineers. 11-3021 is chosen as primary because the role carries direct reports, hiring authority, and roadmap ownership; 15-1252 is the strong runner-up given the dominant coding expectation.
The title 'Technical Lead Manager' carries no standard seniority level word, so the title states no level. The actual scope (small team lead, 8+ years required, no org-wide authority) maps to Senior.
The degree requirement states 'BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a highly quantitative field' with no 'or equivalent experience' escape hatch, so Bachelors is set as the minimum hard requirement.
The posted salary range contains a likely typo ('$230,00') — interpreted as $230,000 based on context and the stated upper bound of $270,000.
LLM/agentic engineering experience and secure sandboxed runtime/container isolation experience are stated as hard requirements in the 'About You' section; specific named technologies (LangGraph, LangChain, Docker, gVisor, WebAssembly, GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, Redis, Pub/Sub, React, Node.js, Next.js, Go) appear in the 'Our Technical Stack' narrative section and are marked preferred accordingly.
Python is marked required as it is explicitly called out in the 'About You' requirements section (model-generated Python scripts as a core use case) and is the primary language for the agentic/LLM work described. Go appears only in the stack listing.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is marked required as it is explicitly called out as a core architectural responsibility ('Pioneer Tool Orchestration & MCP') in the role's primary duties.
RAG (hybrid vector-search RAG pipelines) is listed under the AI & Models stack section; marked preferred as it appears only in the stack narrative, not in a hard-requirements block.
The role is tagged #Li-Hybrid, indicating a hybrid in-office arrangement; remote is set to false.
Read the full posting
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