Senior Engineering Manager, AI Product (Thunderbolt)
About the role
Why Thunderbird?
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.
We are open source by design. Our products are developed transparently and in collaboration with a global community of contributors, and that same spirit shapes how we work: collaboratively, inclusively, and with a shared commitment to putting users first.
We are a small but growing company of 60+ people distributed across seven countries. As Thunderbird evolves beyond a single desktop application, we are expanding across desktop, mobile, paid services, and new product experiences that help people and organizations work more effectively without giving up control to big tech ecosystems.
Our revenue model combines user donations, which help keep Thunderbird’s apps freely available, with paid services that cover the costs of hosted offerings while supporting long-term sustainability and continued innovation.
The opportunity
Thunderbolt is an open-source, cross-platform AI product initiative from the team behind Thunderbird. It is being built around a clear principle: people and organizations should be able to use AI while staying in control of their data, infrastructure, model choices, and long-term options. Thunderbolt is designed to support flexible deployment models, integrations with AI tools and workflows, and use cases across desktop, web, and mobile.
We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead engineering execution, people management, and operating practices for Thunderbolt as it moves from R&D incubation into a more mature product and enterprise development phase. This role will help the team define what production-ready means at this stage: stronger release discipline, clearer ownership, higher user-facing product quality, stronger engineering practices, and a more scalable operating model.
This is a hands-on technical management role. The Senior Engineering Manager will manage a senior engineering team, stay closely engaged with the codebase and technical execution, coordinate work across employees, contractors, and technical partners, and help the team deliver a reliable, enterprise-ready open-source AI product. The right person will bring strong people management skills, strong product engineering judgment, and enough technical depth to evaluate engineering work credibly, support architectural and implementation tradeoffs, and help the team keep shipping with quality.
What you’ll do
- Lead engineering execution by clarifying priorities, ownership, timelines, risks, dependencies, and quality expectations