Engineering Manager

Job Description

About Skillshare

Skillshare is the leading learning community for creatives. With more than 30,000 expert-led classes in illustration, design, photography, video, marketing, and more, Skillshare empowers anyone, anywhere to learn new skills, share expertise, and unlock their creative potential. Hundreds of thousands of member subscribers around the world come to Skillshare to discover new passions, advance careers, and connect with an inspiring community of teachers and peers.

Backed by top investors including Newspring Capital, OMERS Ventures, and Union Square Ventures, our mission is to build the world’s most thriving creative learning community.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced and passionate Engineering Manager to lead one of our core product engineering teams. This role is critical in guiding our strategic transition from our current systems towards a modern, scalable architecture. You will be instrumental in shaping the technical direction and delivery of our product, while fostering a high-performance, collaborative team culture. This role requires a balance of strong technical expertise, strategic vision, and a deep commitment to mentoring and developing engineers. If you thrive in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment and can balance elegant, scalable solutions with simple, pragmatic execution, we encourage you to apply.

• Lead and Grow Your Team: Directly manage, mentor, and coach a team of engineers and tech leads, focusing on career development, performance, and skill enhancement.
• Engineering Strategy: Collaborate with the Engineering Leadership Team to define and drive the overall Engineering Team vision, strategy, and roadmap. Own the team's application health and reliability, leading the prioritization and management of technical debt and ensuring adherence to SRE principles for monitoring and incident response.
• Execution and Delivery: Partner with Product and Design teams to translate high-level concepts and designs into well-defined projects, ensuring high-quality, on-time delivery from conception through production. 
• Agile Process Champion: Ensure rigorous documentation and definition of all work within tooling (ie. Jira), including clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and accurate real-time status updates, making the tool the authoritative source of truth for project status.
• Quality and Standards: Champion best practices for code quality, architectural standards, performance, and accessibility across the code base, actively participating in pull request reviews and technical discussions.
• Recruitment and Scaling: Play a critical role in the growth of the engineering team by recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding new, talented team members.
• Technical Vision: Help the team strike a balance between speed of execution and building for long-term scalability and maintainability.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional experience in building highly scalable web applications.
• 2+ years of direct experience managing, mentoring, and developing software engineers.
• Demonstrated expertise in Agile frameworks, particularly Scrum, with a proven track record of driving execution and delivery predictability.
• Strong technical foundation and comfort guiding teams using our core stack: PHP, GraphQL, TypeScript, and React.
• Proven experience managing application reliability and operational health, including the strategic prioritization of technical debt and upholding SRE or DevOps principles.
• Expertise in managing project workflow within tools like Jira, including defining, documenting, and prioritizing detailed user stories and conducting accurate capacity planning.
• Extensive technical experience building and operating consumer-facing web applications at scale.
• Proven ability to collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, and other business stakeholders.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with an ability to articulate technical decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice to Haves

• Previous experience working in a high-growth startup environment.
• Experience at a B2C subscription-based company, dealing with rapid user growth and retention challenges.
• Familiarity with payments processing systems (e.g., Stripe, Adyen) and related security/compliance best practices.
• Familiarity with modern deployment practices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Utilizes AI tooling to improve their every day work flows
• A track record of contributing to community best practices or championing specific technical areas (e.g., accessibility, performance optimization).

Benefits

Why You Are Excited About Us

• Our team: We have a passionate, creative, and innovative team that is a lot of fun to work with.
• Our mission: We’re doing work that matters – connecting lifelong learners around the world and empowering them to pursue their creativity.
• Flexibility: We believe that doing your best work means living a full life. That means different things for everyone, so we optimize for trust, invest to support remote teams, offer home office stipends and co-working spaces in multiple cities, have an unlimited vacation policy (with a required minimum!), and encourage work-life balance.
• Impact: You will directly shape the experience of millions of students and teachers on Skillshare.
• Your growth: You’ll have opportunities to take ownership, collaborate across disciplines, and expand your expertise.
• Benefits: We believe that doing your best work means living a full life. We support our team with unlimited PTO, gender-neutral parental leave, anniversary sabbaticals, and healthy stipends for creativity, learning, and personal wellness.

At Skillshare, we believe creativity thrives in an inclusive environment. We’re excited to meet candidates from all backgrounds and experiences. If you’re passionate about what we do but don’t check every single box, we’d still love to hear from you — curiosity and growth matter most to us.