Engineering Manager, Core Systems

Role overview Lead an engineering team responsible for foundational systems used across a growing software product and its engineering organization. The role combines people leadership, architecture, reliability, and delivery: set technical direction, grow engineers, and turn broad platform investments into practical milestones. A key outcome is making shared systems easier to operate and helping product teams build and ship effectively.

Responsibilities - Coach and develop software engineers, set clear expectations, and contribute to hiring and team planning. - Work with senior engineers to guide architecture and balance reliability, scalability, security, maintainability, and operational simplicity. - Set priorities and convert large technical goals into incremental plans with clear ownership, milestones, and measures of progress. - Reduce avoidable complexity, operational burden, and recurring technical debt while evolving existing systems. - Build shared services, APIs, tools, and platform capabilities in partnership with product engineering teams. - Improve operations through observability, incident learning, capacity planning, and attention to systemic reliability issues.

Requirements - Experience managing engineering teams responsible for complex production systems. - Strong software engineering foundation and the ability to contribute to architecture and system design discussions. - Experience with distributed systems, backend services, shared platforms, or similarly foundational technology. - A record of delivering substantial technical initiatives across systems or teams. - Good judgment in balancing architectural investment with simpler approaches, and experience with systems where reliability, scale, security, and operations matter. - Clear communication with technical and nontechnical stakeholders, plus the ability to coach experienced engineers and build accountability.

Nice to have Experience with large cloud systems, distributed data, service-oriented architectures, mature systems with high availability needs, multi-region or multi-tenant designs, or internal platforms. Experience in software-as-a-service, education technology, or another privacy-sensitive setting is also useful.