Engineering Manager, Product Engineering (Player-Coach)

$190k - $260k + Bonus + Equity + Unlimited PTO

Remote (US only)

Profitable Bootstrapped Marketplace

As a Product Engineering Manager, you'll join a fast-growing bootstrapped startup that's already profitable and lead the small team that owns everything the user touches on both sides of the marketplace: the customer experience and the vendor experience.

That dual surface is the job. Two very different users, two very different jobs to be done, one product that has to work beautifully for both, and a team small enough that you're personally building on both sides rather than reviewing someone else's work on them.

This is a genuine 60/40 role. The majority of your time goes on designing and evolving those user experiences, shipping features and experiments, and solving hard product problems. The rest goes on growing a team of 4-5 product engineers, developing individuals, and putting in just enough process that people can build rather than sit in meetings about building. You'll report to the VP of Engineering.

The culture is the reason people stay. This is a small team of entirely senior contributors, principal and staff level engineers who have deliberately chosen to remain very close to the work and build something every day rather than drift into pure oversight. There is very little process overhead, a genuinely high bar, and a real allergy to enterprise ritual. Autonomy is the default and the standards are set by the people around you, not by a framework.

The product is stable, but there's a large gap between where it is today and the experience a loved household brand would have. Iterations on existing surfaces, plus a real backlog of new ideas waiting to be tested. This is explicitly not a busy work job. You'll shape both the technical direction and the team culture of a growing function.

Worth saying plainly: they score candidates on two separate axes, hands-on engineering and management, and you need to clear the bar on both. A brilliant engineer who treats management as overhead doesn't get hired here, and neither does a leader who has drifted too far from the product. The role flexes from Manager to Director depending on the seniority of the person.

Responsibilities

Individual contributor (60%)

Design and build high-quality, accessible, well-architected product across React, React Native, GraphQL, and Python.
Ship features and experiments across both sides of the marketplace, customer-facing and vendor-facing, holding the quality bar equally on each.
Work closely with product and design to influence the direction of the user experience, not just execute against a spec.
Own the full-stack lifecycle: design the data workflows first, phase the work, hold backward compatibility for native releases and deploys, ship small.
Take priority workstreams from problem to shipped solution, working directly alongside executives where it matters.

Management (40%)

Mentor and grow the existing team of 4-5 product engineers, with a development plan for each of them.
Run regular 1:1s, give meaningful feedback, and support each person's career.
Establish lightweight processes for planning, estimation, and delivery that keep engineers focused on building rather than on overhead.
Partner with product, design, and engineering leadership to make sure the team is on the highest impact problems.
Build an active hiring pipeline and own sourcing, evaluating, closing, and onboarding.
Grow product sense in your engineers, so the team develops an eye for craft and quality rather than just correctness.
Continuously improve how the team works by identifying and removing bottlenecks in tooling, workflow, and delivery.

Required Skills

Strong product engineering experience shipping production applications in React and TypeScript, ideally with GraphQL.
Experience with React Native or a similar cross-platform framework, including the realities of native release cycles.
Direct management experience with 2+ engineers while still personally shipping meaningful product work. A tech lead without reports won't clear the bar.
Experience building for more than one user type, where the same product has to serve distinct audiences with genuinely different needs. Two-sided marketplace experience is ideal.
Comfort across the stack, including API work. Strictly typed Python is ideal, genuine willingness to learn it is acceptable.
Strong opinions on component architecture, type safety, and separation of concerns.
On-call experience, with real production issues you've handled and can talk through.
A track record of partnering with product and design as genuine collaborators, including pushing back on a spec with a better-sized proposal.
A habit of partnering with data and analytics teams, using experiment results and metrics to decide what to ship, hold, or roll back.
Based in the US, in a market the company operates in, so you can be a real user of the product. This one is a hard blocker.

If You Are…

A hands-on engineering leader who chose management as a craft rather than a promotion, and refused the usual trade where the building quietly disappears as the team grows.
Someone who can describe a specific time they prioritised a team member's growth over their own delivery, and a time they went the other way, and why.
Someone with opinions about what to build, not just how to build it, who has advocated for a product improvement that wasn't on the roadmap because they saw the user need.
Someone who understands that the vendor-facing side of a marketplace is not the lesser half, and that the product only works when both sides do.
A self-starter comfortable setting direction for yourself and your team with very little oversight.
Someone who has introduced lightweight process that stuck, and can also point to process they removed.
Someone who wants to sit alongside principal and staff level engineers who are still deep in the product every day, and be held to that standard.
Motivated by craft, ownership, and measurable impact on a profitable business, rather than headcount or title.

The Package

Competitive salary and equity in a bootstrapped, profitable business.
Unlimited PTO, and a culture where people are genuinely expected to take it.
A product budget so you're a real user of what you're building.
Flexible working, with the trust that comes from a fully remote senior team.

If you're looking to lead a team of world-class engineers who are still building every day, then this is the one for you 😀

Engineering Manager - Product Engineering

Job description