Engineering Manager
Lead a distributed team building privacy‑focused web applications for Thunderbird, driving architecture, open‑source collaboration, and cross‑country coordination while ensuring high‑quality, secure email experiences.
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 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.
Our small but growing distributed team includes 65+ people across seven countries. As Thunderbird evolves beyond a single desktop application, we are expanding across desktop, mobile, and paid services to build independent, privacy-respecting alternatives 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.
A note about MZLA and Mozilla : MZLA Technologies Corporation is the nonprofit-owned company behind Thunderbird and part of the Mozilla family. MZLA is separate from Mozilla Corporation and has its own compensation programs, benefits, and employment policies.
To learn more, visit www.thunderbird.net
The opportunity
Thunderbird is growing beyond our free desktop and mobile applications, and we’re looking for a Senior Manager, Web Applications to lead day-to-day engineering execution and people management for the team responsible for MZLA’s hosted subscription products.
This is a critical product and revenue area for MZLA. The Senior Manager will help the team launch, maintain, and improve hosted services with strong delivery discipline, clear ownership, reliable engineering practices, and a continued focus on quality, privacy, reliability, and user trust.
This is a hands-on technical management role for someone who is comfortable staying close to the codebase, product direction, service reliability needs, release readiness, and engineering tradeoffs while also leading people and improving how the team operates. As the Web Applications team continues to mature, this role will require an engaged manager who can help create structure, solve problems, support execution, and build stronger systems around the work.
This role requires consistent overlap with EST time zone working hours, and we strongly prefer candidates located in or closely aligned with this time zone.
What you’ll do
Posted June 21, 2026