Staff Engineer (Senior Engineering Manager)

About AnswersNow

At AnswersNow, we are trailblazing the future of autism therapy, making it more immediate, accessible, and effective for families everywhere. Our innovative virtual ABA therapy platform is thoughtfully designed by clinicians to recreate the focused, supportive environment of in-person therapy, complete with distraction-free features and interactive activities that enhance engagement and progress.

Our team operates fully remote—meaning you’ll have the flexibility to work from the comfort of home. If you're ready to make a meaningful impact and join a team that's reshaping autism therapy, we’d love to hear from you!

Why this role matters:

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager who knows that great engineering leadership is about growing people, removing obstacles, and making the team better—not writing the most code. You've led teams before. You know how to hold a high bar for craft while keeping engineers energized and growing. You understand that a team of four highly effective engineers with strong habits will outperform a team of twelve with unclear expectations.

You'll manage a team of Engineering Team Leads, each of whom runs a squad of full-stack engineers. You own the health of the engineering organization: hiring, performance, culture, delivery, and the processes that keep everything running. You partner closely with the CTO, product leadership, and clinical stakeholders to ensure engineering is building the right things, the right way.

This is a player-coach role in spirit—you should be technically credible and able to engage meaningfully in architecture discussions—but your primary output is team output, not individual code.

Job Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a senior or staff-level role

• Deep expertise in JavaScript and TypeScript in a production full-stack environment

• Strong command of React, Node.js/Express, and Postgres—you can reason about performance, reliability, and maintainability at each layer

• Proven experience designing and owning distributed systems or data pipeline architectures on AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda experience valued)

• Track record of technical mentorship—you've made engineers around you measurably better

• Excellent written and verbal communication; you can write an architecture doc, run a design review, and brief a non-technical executive in the same day

• Experience working in or leading engineering at a growth-stage startup—you understand the balance between velocity and sustainability

• Familiarity with ETL pipelines, AI/LLM integration patterns, or data-intensive systems is a strong plus

• Significant experience architecting and deploying production-grade ML/AI systems, including LLM integration and model lifecycle management

Nice to have:

• Experience with healthcare or regulated data environments (HIPAA compliance, PHI handling)

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, message queues, or streaming pipelines

• Prior experience as an engineering manager who returned to an IC track (player-coach background welcome)

• Contributions to open source or engineering blog posts/conference talks

What You’ll Do

Technical Leadership

• Own and evolve the architecture of our core platform: React frontend, Node.js/Express APIs, Postgres, and AWS ECS infrastructure

• Drive our JavaScript → TypeScript migration, establishing patterns, tooling, and standards the team can follow

• Design and extend our ETL pipeline and config-driven AI integration framework, enabling engineers to ship AI-powered features faster and more reliably

• Lead technical design reviews, create architecture decision records (ADRs), and ensure engineering decisions are documented and defensible

• Identify and resolve systemic technical debt—not just flagging it, but owning the plan to address it

• Define and execute the technical strategy for integrating ML/AI models into our core platform, ensuring scalability, performance, and reliability

Engineering Culture & Mentorship

• Mentor engineers across all levels—pair, review, coach, and grow the team's collective capability

• Establish and maintain engineering standards: code quality, testing practices, observability, on-call runbooks, and incident response

• Serve as a technical resource and thought partner for product, clinical, and business stakeholders

• Help define the engineering hiring bar and participate in the interview process

Delivery & Operations

• Partner with engineering leadership and product to scope, sequence, and de-risk large technical initiatives

• Lead by example on production support—define runbooks, own post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes from incidents

• Work across UI, API, DB, and infrastructure layers with genuine depth in at least two