Engineering Manager, Product Foundations

Not only do you have the broad, extensive knowledge of core software development technologies, but you also have a high level of empathy and the interpersonal skills to work cross-functionally in an organization. You can grasp and communicate complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences. Being able to see the bigger picture, you bring people together to effectively prioritize, craft, and achieve plans. 

As an Engineering Manager at Justworks, you will help build and oversee a team of software engineers as a player-coach. You are responsible for coordinating projects, setting priorities, and motivating engineers to create and maintain features for our customers. The role involves a mix of hands-on coding and a strong technical background, with a passion for mentoring and growing teams.

What You Will Work On

The Product Foundations team owns a set of core platform capabilities that support customers across the Justworks experience. Our scope includes reporting and analytics, document management, training, calendars, communications, and organizational data access, serving both administrators and employees.

We focus on building intuitive, reliable, and scalable experiences that customers depend on to access information, complete critical workflows, and manage their organizations effectively. The team works at the intersection of user experience, platform capabilities, and operational efficiency, with a strong emphasis on usability, self-service, and reducing customer friction.

As a member of Product Foundations, you'll work on products that have broad impact across the platform, balancing the stability and performance of mission-critical functionality with opportunities to introduce innovative solutions. The team also led the development of the company's first AI-powered product experience, reflecting our commitment to applying emerging technologies where they can meaningfully improve customer outcomes.

Lead, build, and scale a high-performing backend engineering pod. As a technical leader, you will act as a true mentor and strategist—not just a manager—balancing people leadership with technical execution. You will bridge the gap between technical and non-technical teams while championing the integration of AI to drive feature innovation and operational efficiency.

How You Will Do Your Work

As an Engineering Manager, how results are achieved is paramount for your success and ultimately result in our success as an organization. In this role, your foundational knowledge, skills, abilities and personal attributes are anchored in the following competencies:

Good judgment - the exercise of critical thinking, analyzing and assessing problems and implications, identifying patterns, making connections of underlying issues, understanding risks and developing mitigation strategies, and taking ownership of the outcome.

Resourcefulness - taking a can-do approach, even in the face of obstacles and constraints by assessing what’s in front of you and effectively and efficiently optimizing what you have, whether it's working on something new or thinking about how to do something better.

Teamwork and communication - putting our collective best together through documentation, collaboration, relationship-building, listening, empathy, recruiting, and evangelism.Influence and leadership - fostering a community of knowledge-sharing, collaboration, mentorship, and forward-thinking.

Skills and knowledge - the capacity to actively learn and apply specific domain knowledge, know-how, and best practices to continually enhance and improve.

In addition, all Justworkers focus on aligning their behaviors to our core values known as COGIS. It stands for:

• Camaraderie - Day to day you can be seen working together toward a higher purpose. You like to have fun. You’re an active listener, treat people respectfully, and have a strong desire to know and help others.
• Openness - Your default is to be open. You're willing to share information, understand other perspectives, and consider new possibilities. You’re curious, ask open questions, and are receptive to thoughts and feedback from others.
• Grit - You demonstrate grit by having the courage to commit and persevere. You’re committed, earnest, and dive in to get the job done well with a positive attitude.
• Integrity - Simply put, do what you say and say what you'll do. You’re honest and forthright, have a strong moral compass, and strive to match your words with your actions while leading by example. 
• Simplicity - Be like Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience as a software engineer working on production web applications
• Minimum of 1 years of engineering management experience in the industry, with a proven track role in building and growing teams.
• A strong technical leader comfortable with a 50/50 split between people management and hands-on technical guidance.
• Solid experience leveraging AI technologies to build modern features and optimize system maintenance.
• Exceptional cross-functional communication skills, with the ability to lead and collaborate effectively across both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• High levels of empathy and interpersonal skills
• Core experience with Go, Microservices, Kubernetes, AWS, and Event-Driven Architecture. 
• Core Web technologies: i.e. Data structures, data stores, algorithms, distributed systems and common patterns around these frameworks

Technologies Used

• Golang, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, MySQL, Kafka, AWS, Git, Memcache, Redis, ElasticSearch, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, CircleCI, DataDog

The base wage range for this position based in our New York City Office is targeted at $212,000.00 to $274,000.00 per year.

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