Engineering Manager – Core Systems

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada.

📋 Description

• Oversee, mentor, and nurture a team of software engineers focused on essential shared systems.

• Cultivate a high-achieving team with defined expectations for ownership, technical excellence, collaboration, and delivery.

• Facilitate engineers' technical and leadership development through constructive feedback, coaching, and strategic assignment of responsibilities.

• Collaborate with engineering leadership on recruitment, organizational strategy, and future team capabilities.

• Direct foundational systems that underpin Seesaw products and the engineering organization.

• Set architectural direction and navigate technical trade-offs in collaboration with senior and staff engineers.

• Guarantee reliability, scalability, security, maintainability, and operational simplicity.

• Balance enhancements to existing systems with long-term architecture and platform investments.

• Minimize unnecessary complexity, operational challenges, and ongoing technical debt.

• Convert technical and business objectives into actionable engineering plans and incremental milestones.

• Define ownership, priorities, success metrics, and decision-making points.

• Identify execution risks and address cross-team dependencies and obstacles.

• Develop APIs, services, tools, and platform capabilities for product engineering teams.

• Collaborate with product engineering teams to address pain points and develop shared solutions.

• Clarify boundaries and ownership between platform and product functionalities.

• Foster an operational culture through observability, incident reviews, capacity planning, and production data analysis.

• Enhance reliability and resilience based on customer and business impacts.

• Provide transparent visibility into system health, risks, and long-term strategic direction.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience managing software engineering teams responsible for intricate production systems.

• Solid software engineering expertise and technical acumen to engage meaningfully in architectural and system-design conversations.

• Background in designing, operating, or leading teams accountable for distributed systems, backend services, shared platforms, or similar foundational technologies.

• Demonstrated history of executing significant technical initiatives involving multiple systems or engineering teams.

• Strong judgment regarding architectural investments compared to simpler alternatives.

• Experience in creating systems where reliability, scalability, security, and operational quality are paramount.

• Ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

• Excellent people-management skills, including the ability to coach seasoned engineers and establish clear accountability without micromanagement.

• Comfort in navigating ambiguity and making critical technical trade-offs.

• Nice to have: Experience managing large-scale cloud systems, especially AWS.

• Nice to have: Familiarity with distributed data systems, service-oriented architectures, or high-scale backend platforms.

• Nice to have: Experience in evolving mature systems while maintaining high availability.

• Nice to have: Knowledge of multi-region, multi-tenant, or data-residency architectures.

• Nice to have: Experience in building internal platforms or shared capabilities utilized by multiple product engineering teams.

• Nice to have: Background in SaaS, educational technology, or sectors with significant security and privacy requirements.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and performance-based bonuses.

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.

• Flexible working hours and remote work opportunities.

• Generous vacation and paid time off policies.

• Professional development and continuous learning opportunities.