Engineering Manager - Infrastructure

Pilot spent ten years building the software that powers its own bookkeeping operation, delivering books for thousands of clients. Now, we’re packaging this system as Meridian and making it available to all accounting firms. We’re hiring an engineering manager to help make this future a reality.

We’re looking for a caring, empathetic engineering manager with a technical background who is 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 value ownership over the outcomes you’re responsible for: building a great system that supports our customers.

This role is for the Infrastructure team, which is responsible for core infrastructure, developer experience, the design system, frontend infrastructure, and security.

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

This is a remote position managing a remote team distributed across the United States.

Key Responsibilities

• 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 performance, 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.

About You

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, including at least one year managing a remote team, 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 representing a variety of identities and experiences. Our managers must show an ability to understand and support the needs of marginalized individuals.
• Relationship building: Whether it’s with your engineers, peers, customers, or vendors, you invest in relationships that benefit your team.
• Technical design and strategy: While we expect little to no code output from our Engineering Managers, we look for folks with strong technical backgrounds who can hold their own in technical design discussions and represent the details of their team’s technology to others.

Thoughtful about AI in engineering workflows: We seek to make the most of the latest AI tools, while also mitigating their risks and downsides.

Note: while we do look to hire Engineering Managers with prior engineering management experience, even if you don’t exactly fit all of the requirements above, we’re always interested in talking to great managers, so get in touch!