Earnest empowers ambitious professionals to make confident financial decisions and build the life they envision.
Earnies are committed to helping borrowers move forward with confidence by offering smarter borrowing options with a clearer path to taking control of their debt. If you’re as passionate as we are about our mission, read more below, and let’s build something great together.
As the Engineering Manager, you will:
- Drive Proactive Execution: Move beyond status reporting to deliver data-driven action plans. You will own the end-to-end delivery of your team's roadmap, identifying and communicating technical trade-offs to ensure the team hits key business milestones.
- Modernize the Application Architecture: Lead the strategic effort to reduce complexity in our primary application flows. You will partner with Staff and Senior Engineers to implement a modular, high-observability architecture that enables smaller, faster, and safer product iterations.
- Technical Mentorship & Code Quality: Raise the technical bar for the team by participating in high-level code reviews and architectural design sessions. While you won't be in the codebase daily, you will be responsible for ensuring the team adheres to modern best practices in performance, security, and scalability. You will likely read and review a lot of code, but write only outside of the critical path.
- Shatter Silos & Drive Ownership: Actively partner across multi-functional boundaries including Product, Design, and Operations. You will look beyond your immediate lane to identify systemic challenges, break down silos, and drive proactive ownership across teams.
- Strategic Problem Solver: Navigate the project management Iron Triangle by balancing scope, time, and quality to deliver the best outcome for the business.
About You:
- 7+ years of Software Development experience, with at least 3 years in a formal leadership or management role within a Product Development organization.
- Technical Depth: You have a strong foundation in full-stack engineering patterns. You are able to code and can dive deep into technical and architectural discussions, even if you are no longer an individual contributor.
- B2C Product Focus: Deep experience building and scaling customer-facing products within high-growth, high-scale B2C environments.
- Architectural Intuition: You have experience shaping and guiding complex architectures, with a focus on system performance, scalability, and navigating zero-to-one product ambiguity.
- Effective Communicator: You have a proven ability to translate complex technical gaps into clear, actionable recommendations for cross-functional stakeholders.
- Mentor Mindset: You enjoy coaching engineers through technical hurdles and helping them grow into senior and staff-level roles.
Where:
- This role will be fully remote and based in the US.
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A little about our pay philosophy: We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. We are showcasing a range of your potential base salary based on the roles location. The successful candidate’s starting pay will also be determined based on job-related qualifications, internal compensation, candidate location and budget. This range may be modified in the future.
Earnest believes in enabling our employees to live their best lives. We offer a variety of perks and competitive benefits, including:
- Health, Dental, & Vision benefits plus savings plans
- Mac computers + work-from-home stipend to set up your home office
- Monthly internet and phone reimbursement
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
- 401(k) plan to help you save for retirement plus a company match
- Robust tuition reimbursement program
- $1,000 travel perk on each Earnie-versary to anywhere in the world
- Competitive days of annual PTO
- Competitive parental leave
What Makes an Earnie:
At Earnest, our people bring our cultural principles to life. These principles define how we work, how we win, and what we expect of ourselves and each other:
- Every Second Counts: Speed is our competitive advantage. Our customers need better solutions, and the faster we execute, the greater our chance of success.
- Choose To Do Hard Things: We win by tackling the hard things that others avoid, fueled by grit and resilience.
- Pursue Excellence: Great companies, teams, and individuals never settle and are proud of the work that they do. What’s good enough today won’t be good enough tomorrow. Excellence isn’t a destination; it’s a mindset of continuous improvement.
- Lead Together: Our success comes from how we work together. Leadership is not about titles—it is about action. We take ownership, drive results, and move forward as a team.
- Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously: We take our work seriously, not ourselves. The stakes are high, but a sense of humor keeps us grounded, creative, and resilient.
At Earnest, we are committed to building an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging enables us to move forward with our mission. We are dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage anyone to apply if your experience is close to what we are looking for.
Earnest provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or genetics. Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for the position in a manner consistent with the Fair Chance Ordinance.
Skills Required
- 7+ years of software development experience
- At least 3 years in a formal leadership or management role within a product development organization
- Strong foundation in full-stack engineering patterns and ability to code
- Experience building and scaling customer-facing products in high-growth, high-scale B2C environments
- Experience shaping and guiding complex architectures with focus on performance and scalability
- Proven ability to translate complex technical gaps into clear, actionable recommendations for cross-functional stakeholders
- Mentor mindset; experience coaching engineers toward senior and staff-level growth
- Ability to lead modernization toward a modular, high-observability architecture and participate in high-level code reviews
- Must be based in the United States (role is fully remote and US-based)
Earnest Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Earnest and has not been reviewed or approved by Earnest.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Compensation is considered competitive for many roles and locations, with bonuses and long‑term incentives contributing to total pay. Public postings show explicit salary ranges that help set expectations across functions.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid time off is described as generous for both exempt and non‑exempt employees. Additional elements like paid holidays, sick time, volunteer time, and flexible schedules strengthen time‑away access.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — A remote‑first model, home‑office stipends, monthly internet/phone reimbursement, and Mac hardware support day‑to‑day flexibility. A distinctive annual travel credit on work anniversaries adds meaningful lifestyle value.
Earnest Insights
What We Do
We empower past, present, and soon-to-be students to maximize their financial futures through thoughtful guidance and impactful products. We build tools that help people feel in control of their financial future, including: 1. Student Loan Refinancing - break free from high interest rates or monthly payments. 2. Private Student Loans - low rates, people-first service, and flexible payments. 3. Debt Management - manage all your accounts and become debt-free sooner. 4. Scholarships - access to thousands of scholarships to help students pay less.
Why Work With Us
We strive to maintain and strengthen diversity and inclusion through employee-led Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that empower our Earnies to step into leadership roles and drive our culture. Through ERGs, and with the support of our Executives, we provide a safe space for all Earnies to be their true selves.
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