Engineering Manager

Job description

## **What is Loancrate?** We started Loancrate to make home-buying simpler and less expensive for lenders and borrowers (us!). Today, mortgage lenders are stuck running their companies on software products built 20 years ago. These products are slow, unstable, and don't lead to material improvements in efficiency. When using these systems, the average human cost to originate a loan is still over $11,000. Loancrate builds AI-native tooling to automate mortgage workflows. Our ultimate goal is fully automated origination, which has the potential to save lenders over $16B in operating expense per year. Since starting in 2020, our remote team has enabled our customers to power >$85 billion in new home loans. We are a group of people excited to tackle the complexity of the home-lending industry. We care about collaboration, very open communication covering the good & the bad so that we learn from our decisions quickly, and ultimately having fun while we're building. You'll fit in well if you like diving deep quickly! ## **The Opportunity** Our dreams are big and we have much to build! We're looking for an Engineering Manager to own the health, output, and trajectory of one of our engineering pods — roughly 6–8 engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering. You'll own your pod’s operating system: people, execution, delivery health, cross-functional partnership, and continuous improvement. You'll partner with a Technical Lead on architecture and technical quality, and with a Product Manager on what's worth building. Those partnerships are the job. You are not the technical decision-maker of last resort, and you are not a proxy PM — you are the person accountable for whether the pod is healthy and whether the pod delivers. Our product runs some of the most complex, high-stakes workflows in financial services, and when our software is wrong, someone's home purchase is at risk. That reality shapes how we build and how we manage. ## **What To Expect** On your first day, you'll ship something to production. It's a team tradition, and for managers it's also a statement of intent. We don't want EMs who lose touch with what their engineers actually do all day. A quick note before diving in: we're building an AI-native product, and we rely on AI heavily in our own engineering workflows too. We use background agents, evals, and AI-assisted development. We expect our managers to be fluent in this, not just tolerant of it. If that excites you, you'll thrive here. If it gives you pause, this probably isn't the right fit. From there, your first 90 days will look something like: **First 30 days** Weekly 1:1s established with every direct report, and a real read on each person's strengths, motivation, and growth trajectory. A working understanding of the pod's roadmap, codebase, and dependencies. A clear-eyed inventory of what's actually blocking your engineers. **First 60 days** Your pod’s operating cadence is yours: planning, retros, and follow-through. You're catching stalled or poorly scoped projects before they slip, and you're surfacing risk to the Head of Engineering before it's discovered independently. Your PM has started treating you as a partner in prioritization rather than a recipient of it. **First 90 days** Performance expectations are explicit and understood. Any sustained performance gap on the pod is being actively addressed. New hires are ramping faster than they were before you arrived. The pod is solving most of its own problems without escalation. ## **Core Responsibilities** ### **Pod effectiveness** - Own your pod’s overall performance, and create clarity around priorities, ownership, and expectations. - Own the operating cadence including planning, retros, and follow-through. We’re looking for decision makers instead of status trackers. - Remove what blocks engineers from doing their best work, and keep them on high-leverage problems. - Hold high standards, accountability, autonomy, and psychological safety at the same time. ### **Execution** - Be accountable for whether the pod delivers, and know the roadmap deeply enough to spot risk yourself. - Catch projects that are stalled, poorly scoped, or under-owned and intervene, including when an engineer is blocked or spinning. ### **People management** - Run weekly 1:1s with every direct report, and give specific feedback continuously rather than at review time. - Know each engineer's performance, strengths, motivation, and growth trajectory. This should be top of mind. - Set clear expectations, and give high performers room to increase their impact. - Address sustained performance gaps quickly with direct and honest feedback, coaching, and formal improvement plans when needed. - Support growth, write reviews that are fair and well-supported, and stay alert to burnout and retention risk. - At Loancrate, we care about and for our people and you should too. ### **Onboarding** - Own onboarding for every new engineer including setting up real work before their day one, and a high-touch first month. - Get new hires into production quickly and onto meaningful work. - Keep documentation, runbooks, and ownership boundaries accurate enough that engineers ramp fast. ### **Product partnership** - Partner closely with your pod's Product Manager, and make sure effort lands on genuinely high-value problems. - Challenge unclear, incomplete, or unnecessarily complex requirements. - Participate in planning and prioritization rather than receiving work from Product. - Represent engineering tradeoffs including urgency, cost, quality, and scope to non-engineering stakeholders, and escalate persistent misalignment. ### **Technical partnership** - Partner with your Technical Lead on architecture, quality, and technical risk and protect their capacity to actually lead technically. - Maintain enough technical depth to challenge plans and recognize problems on your own. You don't need to be the strongest engineer on the pod, but you do need to be credible to it. - Ensure technical decisions have clear owners, get made at the right level, and don't stall on unresolved disagreement. - Keep technical debt and quality risk visible and deliberately managed rather than silently absorbed. - Contribute as an IC where it doesn't crowd out the rest of the job, and keep operational burden sustainable so incidents produce durable improvements. On-call is shared team-wide. ### **Staffing and pod design** - Know whether your pod has the right skills and seniority mix, and recommend hiring based on real organizational problems. - Interview meaningfully, vet every candidate entering the final round, and help close strong candidates. - Identify capability and leadership gaps, recommend transfers where an engineer would have more impact, and support succession planning. ### **Communication and escalation** - Give the Head of Engineering an honest picture of pod health, and surface risks and delivery issues early. - Escalate when a problem needs organizational help, not simply because it's hard, with context, options, and a recommendation. - Communicate dependencies and tradeoffs across pods before they become surprises. ## **What Success Looks Like** You're succeeding in this role when: - Engineers on your pod know what's expected of them. - The pod consistently delivers meaningful outcomes, and delivery problems get caught early. - New hires ramp quickly. Strong engineers are visibly growing. Weak performance is being actively addressed. - Morale is good without performance expectations having been lowered to get there. - Your pod doesn’t just take orders from Product. Your PM views Engineering as a strong partner. - Your Technical Lead has room to lead technically. - The pod solves most of its problems without intervention from the Head of Engineering. - You surface important problems before your manager discovers them independently. - Cross-pod dependencies are actively managed, and quality risks are visible before they become incidents. - Documentation and ownership boundaries make onboarding and execution easier over time, not harder. ## **Tech Stack** Nearly all of our code is TypeScript. React + Vite on the frontend, Node/Express on the backend (in Docker), GraphQL/Apollo on both sides, Postgres (Aurora) as our database — all in a Turborepo/PNPM monorepo with types generated from our Postgres and GraphQL schemas and shared end to end. Infrastructure runs on AWS (ECS, Aurora, ElastiCache, MSK/Kafka, OpenSearch) and is managed 100% as code with Terraform and Pulumi. CI/CD runs on Buildkite with TypeScript pipeline-as-code, including per-PR ephemeral environments. Observability is Datadog, CloudWatch, and Sentry. You won't be writing most of this code. You will be expected to understand it well enough to know when a plan doesn't add up. ## **Preferred Skills & Background** (It's okay not to have all of these — these are just some things we're excited about!) 👥 **Experience managing engineers directly** — ideally 5+ on a product or platform team, with real examples of performance you improved and performance you had to manage out. 🛠 **A credible engineering background.** You've shipped production software yourself and can still read a PR, evaluate a design doc, and push back on an estimate. 🚚 **A track record of delivery.** You can point to teams that got predictably better at shipping under your management, and explain what you actually changed. 🤖 **Fluency with modern AI product development** — evals, experiment design, dataset curation, and the reality that non-deterministic systems need different management than deterministic ones. Plus first-hand use of AI in your own engineering workflow. 🧭 **Comfort with ambiguity and high-complexity domains.** Mortgage origination is genuinely hard. You'll need to build real domain understanding, not manage around it. 🤝 **Strong product partnership instincts.** You engage with the "why," challenge weak requirements, and hold your own with non-engineering stakeholders. ✍️ **Crisp written communication.** We're remote-first and write things down. Your reviews, escalations, and updates need to be clear and specific. 🔥 **Directness with care.** You give hard feedback early and kindly, and you'd rather have an uncomfortable conversation now than an unfair surprise later. 📊 **Operational and reliability instincts** — SLOs, incident response, postmortems, and keeping toil off your team's plate. 🔒 **A keen eye for security risk.** We store and display some of people's most sensitive personal data and need to keep it safe. 🌱 **Experience hiring and onboarding** in a growing organization, including interviewing well and closing candidates. ## **Perks & Benefits** - Robust medical coverage (100% of employee + family premiums covered) - Vision & dental coverage - 401(k) - HSA / FSA - Access to lender partner's employee loan program - Remote-first culture — work from wherever you do your best work - Flexible time off — we trust you to manage your time *Loancrate is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.*