Senior Engineering Manager, Product

About the role

Our team is passionate, talented, and deeply customer-focused. We build the platform that thousands of early education programs rely on every day to run their business, serve families, and support children’s growth. As a vertical SaaS company, brightwheel already sits in the middle of the key workflows in early education. We are extending that foundation into a system of action-where software not only records what happened, but also anticipates work, recommends next steps, and takes safe, automated action on behalf of school leaders, teachers, families, and our internal teams.

We’re looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager who combines strong people leadership, technical judgment, and ownership of measurable outcomes. In this role, you will lead a team building customer-facing products that help school leaders, teachers, and families save time, make better decisions, and run stronger programs. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to define what to build, then take it through production, adoption, and measurable customer impact.

What you’ll do

• Lead a full-stack engineering team from problem definition through production, measurement, and iteration.
• Translate company goals into clear outcomes, investment choices, and a credible execution plan.
• Set the engineering strategy for quality, reliability, security, privacy, and operational health.
• Ship AI-powered products and change how the team works with AI-not just add AI features.
• Hire and develop strong engineers, set a clear bar, and act when the team or an individual is below it.
• Make capacity, dependencies, forecasts, and risks visible early.
• Partner early with Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to turn customer problems into shipped product with measurable adoption and impact.
• Own product and platform health across web, mobile, and backend systems, including rollout, reliability, privacy, and support impact.
• Use customer behavior, operational signals, and production data to decide what to build, simplify, or stop.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have led an engineering team that delivered measurable customer or business results.
• Have the technical depth to challenge architecture, product, data, reliability, and operational decisions without taking the work away from the team.
• Have set engineering strategy and made explicit investment and prioritization choices.
• Have shipped an AI-powered product or workflow to production and can explain the measurable result.
• Have hired and developed strong engineers, built succession, and handled performance issues directly.
• Have built trusted partnerships across Product, Design, and business teams while representing a clear Engineering point of view.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience in vertical SaaS, education, fintech, healthcare, CRM, ecommerce, or another operations-heavy domain.
• Led a material change in product direction, architecture, or operating model.
• Built production AI products, agents, evaluation systems, or automation.
• Experience building customer-facing products with measurable adoption or outcome impact.
• Experience using customer feedback and production data to improve web, mobile, or backend product outcomes.

Technology

• Backend: Ruby on Rails and Sidekiq.
• Frontend and mobile: React with TypeScript; native iOS with Swift and Android with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose.
• Data and infrastructure: PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, and AWS.
• AI and automation: AWS Bedrock and other hosted models, vector search, orchestration frameworks, and modern AI coding tools.

Additional information

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