Engineering Manager

Overview

The Engineering Manager takes full responsibility for the delivery of systems, ensuring they are completed on schedule with consistent quality, while fostering the professional growth of their team members. Success in this role requires proactive management to avoid unexpected delays and maintaining sustainable development rhythms rather than focusing on individual project shipments.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and oversee a team of more than 10 engineers, guiding them through technical design reviews and strategic approach framing rather than day-to-day coding tasks.
• Break down tasks, accurately estimate and monitor progress using concrete metrics, and provide early alerts to potential schedule delays with an ability to adjust scope to meet deadlines.
• Implement development processes where absent, including alerting systems, error budget tracking, velocity measurement, and estimation practices, ensuring team adherence beyond mere compliance.
• Define approaches to vague or insufficiently detailed challenges, determining the minimal viable solutions, prioritizing feature sets for customers or market segments, and clearly delineating what will not be pursued.
• Collaborate closely with Product teams to mediate inclusion or exclusion of features without undermining the roadmap or succumbing to pressure.
• Manage a diverse team encompassing high performers as well as members needing performance improvement, making decisive personnel decisions as necessary.
• Maintain strict hiring standards and enforce them rigorously, even under pressure to fill open roles, while not directly owning overall headcount decisions.
• Critically evaluate system designs to identify missing failure modes and, when necessary, create high-level designs down to API and data model specifics.
• Lead the team through production incidents by managing customer communications and conducting serious postmortems that result in meaningful process or system changes.
• Collaborate across functions including Support, Design, Compliance, and Finance to obtain alignment despite differing incentives.
• Engage leadership candidly by delivering hard truths and negotiating resources or timelines without conceding unreasonably.
• Create and sustain an attractive workplace environment encouraging team members to remain long term through actionable initiatives rather than abstract values.
• Continuously keep up-to-date with industry developments via trusted sources, integrating relevant shifts into practical team decisions.