Loancrate - Engineering Manager

• Pod effectiveness • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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. • 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.