Senior Manager of Coder Fellows

• Coding Fellows create high-quality technical content used to train and evaluate AI systems. Depending on the project and each Fellow’s strengths, their work may include writing and reviewing code, opening pull requests, creating annotations or documentation, improving others’ work, and coaching peers
• We are looking for a leader to directly manage a portfolio of Fellows who may contribute across multiple projects over time. Project delivery teams own day-to-day tasks, priorities, and outcomes; this role owns the people-management layer across projects, including expectations, performance, support, development, administration, and a fair, consolidated view of each Fellow’s contribution
• This is a people-first role. You should have enough technical depth to understand and discuss Fellow work, but you will not be the day-to-day technical lead or approver for every project
• Lead and support Coding Fellows
• Build trusted relationships through regular one-on-ones and ongoing communication. Understand each Fellow’s strengths, goals, challenges, and support needs; set clear expectations; and partner with People Operations and project leaders on onboarding and administrative matters
• Own cross-project performance management
• Set expectations for quality, reliability, collaboration, communication, flexibility, learning, and professional conduct. Gather and synthesize feedback across projects, accounting for assignment complexity, project context, ramp time, and changing responsibilities. Recognize strong performance, provide candid feedback, and address concerns early through focused improvement plans
• Maintain technical credibility and quality
• Review representative work, including code, pull requests, reviews, annotations, documentation, and commentary, to understand quality and development needs. Partner with delivery and quality leads to identify recurring issues and distinguish individual performance concerns from unclear requirements, insufficient context, or process gaps
• Partner with project delivery teams
• Create effective feedback loops with project managers, technical leads, reviewers, and other delivery partners. Establish clear expectations when Fellows join projects, preserve context during transitions, surface assignment mismatches or blockers, and resolve conflicts with fairness and discretion
• Coach growth and strengthen the program
• Hold regular career conversations and help Fellows grow as individual contributors, reviewers, quality specialists, coaches, or mentors. Use contextualized metrics to monitor quality, throughput, reliability, team health, and retention; improve feedback and calibration processes; and contribute to hiring and workforce planning as the program scales
• You own: Fellow support, people administration, performance expectations, consolidated feedback, performance reviews, coaching, development, and long-term success
• Project delivery teams own: day-to-day task assignment, project-specific priorities, delivery plans, immediate deliverable acceptance, and project execution
• You will work closely with delivery teams, but you will not run every stand-up, manage every task, or assess performance using raw activity metrics alone
• What success looks like:
• Coding Fellows understand expectations, receive consistent support, and trust their manager
• Performance reviews reflect evidence across projects—not a single assignment or raw activity metric
• Delivery teams provide timely, specific feedback and know how to partner with the Coding Fellows Manager
• Strong work is recognized, growth is visible, and performance concerns are addressed early
• Fellows transition between projects with clear context and continuous support
• The program improves quality, throughput, collaboration, communication, and retention without compromising fairness or the quality of the work

Benefits

• Health: Snorkelers and their dependents are covered by comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans.
• Wellness: All Snorkelers get a yearly wellness stipend to use on anything related to health and well-being.
• PTO and rest days: We provide unlimited personal time off so you can find your work-life balance. Plus, two company-wide rest days per quarter in addition to company holidays.
• One global team: From our headquarters in Redwood City, CA, to regional offices in San Francisco and New York, we work together as one global team.
• Events: Get to know your fellow Snorkelers outside of work! We host regular events and learning opportunities for our teams across our offices and virtually to connect, have fun, and grow.
• Family leave: Snorkel offers generous parental leave for both birthing and non-birthing parents based on eligibility.- A computer-science degree is not required. Experience with AI/ML development, model evaluation, annotation, data quality, or technical-content production is helpful
• Experience managing people across multiple projects, clients, teams, or changing assignments
• 3+ years of experience in software engineering, technical leadership, or a related environment, including direct management of programmers or software engineers
• Experience in a consultancy, software agency, contract engineering shop, professional-services organization, staff-augmentation model, or similar distributed environment is strongly preferred
• Strong written and verbal communication, sound judgment, discretion, empathy, and a collaborative, low-ego approach
• Enough technical depth to read and discuss code and pull requests, assess engineering judgment, and understand core software-development practices
• Demonstrated experience hiring, onboarding, coaching, conducting performance reviews, delivering actionable feedback, and handling difficult conversations
• Ability to evaluate performance thoughtfully rather than relying on throughput, ticket volume, or other simple metrics