Engineering Manager, Core Systems

Accountabilities: Lead and develop the engineering team: Manage, coach, and mentor software engineers working on critical shared systems, establishing clear expectations for ownership, collaboration, technical quality, and delivery. Provide regular feedback, support career development, and help engineers strengthen their technical and leadership capabilities. Define technical direction and architecture: Partner with senior and staff engineers to establish architectural strategies, evaluate tradeoffs, and guide decisions affecting foundational systems. Ensure solutions prioritize reliability, scalability, security, maintainability, and operational simplicity. Drive platform improvements: Translate business priorities and technical objectives into actionable engineering roadmaps. Break complex initiatives into manageable milestones, define success metrics, clarify ownership, and ensure meaningful progress without relying on unnecessarily large-scale rewrites. Improve system reliability and operational excellence: Establish a strong operational culture through observability, incident management, capacity planning, and production monitoring. Lead incident reviews, identify root causes, and ensure recurring issues are addressed through sustainable engineering improvements. Enable product engineering teams: Treat internal engineering teams as key stakeholders by developing reliable APIs, services, tools, and shared platform capabilities. Collaborate with product teams to understand their challenges, eliminate recurring friction, and establish clear boundaries between shared infrastructure and product-specific functionality. Manage execution and dependencies: Identify technical risks, resolve blockers, coordinate cross-team initiatives, and maintain predictable delivery. Introduce appropriate planning and accountability while avoiding unnecessary processes that slow down engineering work. Support organizational growth: Collaborate with engineering leadership on recruitment, team structure, resource planning, and long-term capability development. Build an environment that encourages autonomy, continuous learning, and strong technical ownership. Communicate progress and system health: Provide clear visibility into engineering priorities, architectural decisions, operational risks, and long-term platform investments to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Requirements Demonstrated experience managing software engineering teams responsible for complex production systems, including the ability to coach experienced engineers and build a high-performing team. Strong software engineering background with sufficient technical depth to contribute meaningfully to architecture discussions, system design reviews, and complex engineering decisions. Experience designing, operating, or leading teams responsible for distributed systems, backend services, shared platforms, or other foundational technologies. Proven ability to deliver significant technical initiatives involving multiple systems, engineering teams, or cross-functional dependencies. Strong understanding of system reliability, scalability, security, maintainability, and operational excellence in production environments. Sound technical judgment, including the ability to balance long-term architectural investments with simpler, pragmatic solutions that meet current business needs. Experience translating broad technical and business objectives into executable plans, measurable milestones, and clear delivery priorities. Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to engineers, leadership, and non-technical partners. Strong people-management skills, including providing constructive feedback, developing talent, establishing accountability, and empowering engineers without micromanaging. Comfort working in ambiguous environments where technical decisions involve competing priorities, architectural tradeoffs, and evolving business requirements. Additional qualifications considered an asset: Experience operating large-scale cloud infrastructure, particularly within AWS. Familiarity with distributed data systems, service-oriented architectures, and high-scale backend platforms. Experience evolving mature systems while maintaining high availability and minimizing customer disruption. Knowledge of multi-region, multi-tenant, or data-residency architectures. Experience building internal developer platforms or shared capabilities used by multiple engineering teams. Background in SaaS, education technology, or other industries with significant security and data privacy requirements. Benefits Meaningful technical impact: Lead the development of foundational systems that enable product teams to deliver better experiences and innovate more effectively. Engineering leadership opportunities: Shape technical strategy, influence architectural decisions, and contribute to the long-term direction of the engineering organization. Team development: Help experienced engineers grow their skills, autonomy, and leadership capabilities while fostering a culture of collaboration and technical excellence. Complex technical challenges: Work on distributed systems, scalable backend services, platform architecture, and reliability improvements in a production environment. Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with engineering leadership and product teams to solve important technical and business challenges. Long-term platform ownership: Guide architectural investments and continuous improvement initiatives that strengthen system reliability and simplify future development. Remote-friendly opportunity: The position is based in Canada. Specific work arrangements and location requirements should be confirmed with the hiring team.