Engineering Manager - Realtime

Role overview Lead the people, delivery, and technical direction of a team building a globally distributed real-time service. The product supports low-latency messaging, shared client state, and database change notifications, so the team must balance responsiveness, fair usage, cost, and dependable connections. You will guide experienced engineers and contribute to design and operational decisions without being expected to write production code.

Responsibilities - Build a supportive, high-trust team; coach direct reports through regular check-ins, feedback, performance management, career development, and onboarding. - Own hiring plans and interviews, partner with recruiting, and contribute to team structure and headcount planning. - Set the roadmap, milestones, and priorities; manage incoming requests, support work, and stakeholder updates. - Keep service objectives on track and surface risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs early. - Coordinate production incidents, support resolution, and lead blameless reviews and follow-up actions. - Join technical design discussions and help maintain standards for engineering quality, testing, and operations.

Requirements - At least five years of engineering experience and three years managing remote engineering teams. - Experience leading a team responsible for a low-latency, high-connection service, such as messaging, streaming, pub/sub, or presence. - Strong understanding of distributed systems, including clustering, rate limits, backpressure, and capacity planning. - Experience managing customer-facing production incidents and leading constructive post-incident follow-up. - A track record of shipping a real-time API or SDK to external customers and understanding developer needs. - Strong coaching and communication skills, including performance management, clear written updates, and the ability to lead through ambiguity.

Nice to have - Experience with Elixir, Erlang, or the BEAM runtime; familiarity with Postgres logical replication and row-level security. - Experience leading globally distributed teams that work asynchronously.

Benefits and work setup The role is fully remote, with a coworking allowance or membership, flexible asynchronous work, equity, a technology budget, health coverage, an annual team gathering, and a professional development allowance.