Engineering Manager — Hands-On Product Engineering

About the Opportunity

Our client is a large, high-growth SaaS company building an AI-native productivity and collaboration platform used by teams globally.

We are hiring an Engineering Manager who is still a strong engineer.

This is not a traditional management-only role. The ideal candidate was a strong Senior or Staff-level engineer before moving into leadership and has remained technically sharp.

You should still be comfortable getting into architecture, system design, code reviews, debugging, and difficult technical decisions.

What You'll Do
Lead and develop a small, high-performing product engineering team.
Own delivery of complex customer-facing features from design through production.
Remain close to the code and provide hands-on technical leadership.
Drive architecture and system-design decisions across frontend and backend systems.
Partner closely with Product and Design to turn ambiguous problems into scalable solutions.
Raise the bar for engineering quality, reliability, testing, and execution.
Mentor engineers through direct technical guidance.
Solve difficult scalability, performance, reliability, and technical-debt problems.
Create a culture of ownership, urgency, and accountability.
What We're Looking For
7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
2+ years of engineering management or technical leadership experience.
Strong Senior or Staff-level IC foundation before moving into leadership.
Recent experience writing, designing, debugging, or materially contributing to production software.
Strong system-design and architecture fundamentals.
Experience building customer-facing SaaS or product software at meaningful scale.
Experience leading engineers without becoming disconnected from the technical work.
Strong product instincts and cross-functional communication.
Proven ownership of complex engineering outcomes.
Relevant Technical Experience

Strong candidates will typically have depth across some combination of:

TypeScript / JavaScript
Node.js
React or other modern frontend frameworks
Go
Python
Backend APIs and services
Distributed systems
Relational databases
AWS
High-scale SaaS architecture
Performance and reliability engineering

Exact stack match is not required.

Ideal Background

We are setting a very high technical bar.

Strong candidates often come from respected product engineering environments where engineers are expected to combine speed, ownership, product thinking, and technical rigor.

Relevant backgrounds may include companies similar to:

Notion, Figma, Airtable, Linear, Asana, Stripe, Dropbox, Slack, Atlassian, or other strong product-focused technology companies.

Company pedigree alone is not enough.

We want to understand:

What you personally built.
What architecture decisions you owned.
How technically involved you remained after becoming a manager.
What happened when the systems your team owned failed or struggled to scale.
This Role Is Probably Not a Fit If
You are primarily a people manager today.
You have been removed from production engineering for several years.
You rely entirely on Staff or Principal engineers for technical direction.
Your background is primarily DevOps, SRE, cloud infrastructure, or platform operations.
You prefer managing large organizations rather than staying close to one engineering team.
You cannot comfortably participate in a high-bar coding and system-design interview.
Why Consider It

This is an opportunity to lead within a highly visible, fast-moving product organization without giving up the technical side of engineering leadership.

You will have meaningful influence across product delivery, architecture, engineering quality, and the development of your team.