Engineering Manager

The Role

Pilot’s mission is to be the back office for every small business in America, and we’re hiring an engineering manager to help make this future a reality.

We are giving every SMB the superpowers of a full finance team at a fraction of the cost. These superpowers include having a deep understanding of the financial health of the business, the machinery to constantly improve it, and the predictive abilities to thoughtfully plan for the future. We do this at a fraction of the cost a large company would pay for this, by delivering these capabilities through powerful software.

We’re looking for a caring, empathetic engineering manager with a technical background that are excited to build and ship software iteratively. We value being close to our customers, iterating quickly, and learning from what we ship. Our teams operate on high trust, and we prioritize ownership over the outcomes you’re responsible for: building great products that move the needle for our customers.

All of our teams have unique charters to collectively build the software, services and systems that enable Pilot to deliver a high-quality experience, profitably, s role is for the Banking Fundamentals team, which is responsible for foundational banking and credit card data and the insights Pilot can provide based on that data.

Our tech stack:
Pilot’s backend is written in fully typed Python 3.13, and our frontend is JavaScript, Type Script, and Vue.js. We use Terraform to manage our production infrastructure, and deploy Docker containers to ECS. AWS Code Deploy powers our deployments and we rely on Honeycomb for our monitoring and Postgres as our database.

This is a hybrid position with the expectation to work in the San Francisco office on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

• Lead a team of talented engineers who like to ship code and tackle hard engineering problems.
• Mentor and guide the professional and technical development of your team members. Help develop their careers, and assign them to projects tailored to their skill levels, personalities, work styles, and professional goals.
• Create a team environment that values collaboration, inclusion, and respect.
• Provide continuous feedback, address underperformance, and recognize the individual strengths and contributions of your team members.
• Create plans for prioritizing technical and resourcing challenges within the team, within the context of the larger Engineering organization.
• Instill a spirit of continuous improvement in the team’s code, architecture, and processes.
• Grow the team thoughtfully by understanding business needs, addressing team skill gaps, and prioritizing a diverse top of funnel.
• Work with your engineers and stakeholders to maintain a prioritized backlog and create short term and long term goals.
• Help your team build relationships across Engineering, Operations, and any other stakeholders who are relevant to the team’s strategy.
• Work across teams to shape development at Pilot (e.g. defining best practices, choosing technologies, evolving our tech stack).
• Think medium- to long-term. We are building for Pilot’s future accelerated growth and need someone with strong foundations who will set us up to scale.

In order to successfully fulfill the responsibilities outlined above, we have a small set of requirements. As our ideal candidate, you will have at least two years of experience in an official managerial role, and you can demonstrate experience with most the following:

• Managing engineers’ performance:
  This could include managing out, performance corrections, giving continuous feedback, and investing in strong performers.
• Growing teams:
  You can identify the need for headcount, define hiring criteria, and act as an owner throughout the entire recruiting lifecycle.
• Technical execution and dependency management:
  Your teams have shipped complex features with dependencies or stakeholders from outside the team, and you’ve played a significant role in their execution.
• Team dynamics:
  You’ve diagnosed a number of issues affecting morale or execution and found various solutions.
• Fostering inclusion within a diverse team:
  We are a diverse team…