Engineering Manager

The role

You will lead a team responsible for product and platform capabilities. You will manage people, technical quality, and reliability while working with Product, Design, QA, and engineering leaders.

What you will do

• Turn company priorities into clear problems, ownership, and honest milestones
• Evaluate technical decisions, review work, and coach engineers on system design and reliability
• Give people meaningful ownership and develop senior engineers and technical leads
• Set expectations, give feedback, and address performance gaps
• Ensure the team designs for realistic failure modes and peak load
• Partner with Product and Design to define problems and ensure software works in classrooms
• Establish clear ownership and decision rights
• Maintain a high hiring bar and onboard people thoughtfully
• Use modern AI development tools with the team
• Communicate clearly across functions and time zones

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience
• 8+ years professional engineering experience, including designing, shipping, and operating consequential production systems
• 2+ years managing mid, senior and lead level software engineers
• Technical depth comparable to a strong Senior or Staff+ Software Engineer
• Strong system design and debugging skills across architecture, APIs, data models, distributed systems, performance, and failure modes
• A track record of developing engineers into more independent owners
• Experience giving difficult feedback, managing underperformance, recognizing strong performance, and running substantive career conversations
• Strong execution judgment
• Experience owning production reliability and incident response
• Strong product judgment and experience shaping scope with Product and Design
• High familiarity with AI-assisted software development
• Clear written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical audiences

Nice to have

• Kotlin, Python, React, TypeScript, MySQL, and AWS
• Operating high-traffic applications and diagnosing application, database, or infrastructure bottlenecks under production load
• Managing full-stack teams while maintaining strong backend or systems depth
• LLM-backed product capabilities, including evaluation, observability, latency, cost, and failure handling
• Leading teams across regions and time zones
• Education technology or another environment where reliability and usability directly affect large numbers of users

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity
• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance
• Medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee premiums
• Flexible PTO policy and company holidays
• DoorDash credit for lunch daily
• Wellhub Membership: 100% company-paid access to premium gym networks, 60+ wellness apps, and 1:1 coaching sessions
• Dog friendly office

Before you apply

• A subsequent criminal, education, and employment history background check will be issued

About the company

Kira is a rapidly growing startup backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Andrew Ng's AI Fund, and Primavera. Their mission is to harness transformative AI technologies to make world-class personalized teaching and learning accessible to everyone.