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Skillshare is an online learning community for creatives.
The Role
The Engineering Manager will lead a core engineering team, focusing on scalable architecture, mentoring engineers, and strategic project delivery within an Agile framework.
Summary Generated by Built In
About Skillshare
Skillshare is the leading learning community for creatives. With more than 30,000 expert-led classes in illustration, design, photography, video, marketing, and more, Skillshare empowers anyone, anywhere to learn new skills, share expertise, and unlock their creative potential. Hundreds of thousands of member subscribers around the world come to Skillshare to discover new passions, advance careers, and connect with an inspiring community of teachers and peers.
Backed by top investors including Newspring Capital, OMERS Ventures, and Union Square Ventures, our mission is to build the world’s most thriving creative learning community.
About the Role
We are looking for an experienced and passionate Engineering Manager to lead one of our core product engineering teams. This role is critical in guiding our strategic transition from our current systems towards a modern, scalable architecture. You will be instrumental in shaping the technical direction and delivery of our product, while fostering a high-performance, collaborative team culture. This role requires a balance of strong technical expertise, strategic vision, and a deep commitment to mentoring and developing engineers. If you thrive in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment and can balance elegant, scalable solutions with simple, pragmatic execution, we encourage you to apply.
What You’ll Do
- Lead and Grow Your Team: Directly manage, mentor, and coach a team of engineers and tech leads, focusing on career development, performance, and skill enhancement.
- Engineering Strategy: Collaborate with the Engineering Leadership Team to define and drive the overall Engineering Team vision, strategy, and roadmap. Own the team's application health and reliability, leading the prioritization and management of technical debt and ensuring adherence to SRE principles for monitoring and incident response.
- Execution and Delivery: Partner with Product and Design teams to translate high-level concepts and designs into well-defined projects, ensuring high-quality, on-time delivery from conception through production.
- Agile Process Champion: Ensure rigorous documentation and definition of all work within tooling (ie. Jira), including clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and accurate real-time status updates, making the tool the authoritative source of truth for project status.
- Quality and Standards: Champion best practices for code quality, architectural standards, performance, and accessibility across the code base, actively participating in pull request reviews and technical discussions.
- Recruitment and Scaling: Play a critical role in the growth of the engineering team by recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding new, talented team members.
- Technical Vision: Help the team strike a balance between speed of execution and building for long-term scalability and maintainability.
What Success Looks Like
- Your team consistently delivers high-quality features and projects that meet business objectives and delight users.
- The team operates with a high degree of predictability and velocity, leveraging Agile practices to consistently meet sprint and roadmap goals.
- The application maintains high uptime and reliability due to effective monitoring and the proactive management of technical debt, minimizing production incidents.
- All project work is accurately documented in Jira, enabling stakeholders to understand real-time status and progress without relying on manual updates.
- Engineers on your team feel supported, receive actionable feedback, and demonstrate strong growth in their technical and professional skills.
- The team's execution is efficient, and technical debt is managed proactively, ensuring a healthy, scalable code base.
- You are a key contributor to defining and executing the long-term Engineering strategy, helping the department mature and scale.
- Hiring targets are met with exceptional talent, effectively contributing to the growth of the organization.
What We’re Looking For (Must-Haves)
- 6+ of professional experience in building highly-scalable web applications.
- 2+ of direct experience managing, mentoring, and developing software engineers.
- Demonstrated expertise in Agile frameworks, particularly Scrum, with a proven track record of driving execution and delivery predictability.
- Strong technical foundation and comfort guiding teams using our core stack: PHP, GraphQL, TypeScript, and React.
- Proven experience managing application reliability and operational health, including the strategic prioritization of technical debt and upholding SRE or DevOps principles.
- Expertise in managing project workflow within tools like Jira, including defining, documenting, and prioritizing detailed user stories and conducting accurate capacity planning.
- Extensive technical experience building and operating consumer-facing web applications at scale.
- Proven ability to collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, and other business stakeholders.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills, with an ability to articulate technical decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Nice-to-Haves
- Previous experience working in a high-growth startup environment.
- Experience at a B2C subscription-based company, dealing with rapid user growth and retention challenges.
- Familiarity with payments processing systems (e.g., Stripe, Adyen) and related security/compliance best practices.
- Familiarity with modern deployment practices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
- Utilizes AI tooling to improve their every day work flows
- A track record of contributing to community best practices or championing specific technical areas (e.g., accessibility, performance optimization).
At Skillshare, we believe creativity thrives in an inclusive environment. We’re excited to meet candidates from all backgrounds and experiences. If you’re passionate about what we do but don’t check every single box, we’d still love to hear from you — curiosity and growth matter most to us.
Top Skills
GraphQL
JIRA
PHP
React
Typescript
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The Company
What We Do
Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people, on topics including illustration, design, photography, video, freelancing, and more. On Skillshare, millions of members come together to find inspiration and take the next step in their creative journey.
Why Work With Us
With Skillshare’s mission at the core of everything we do, our team is driven to make a global impact. That’s why we’ve created a community that champions collaboration and inclusivity. We take pride in treating each person as an owner of the business, with a focus on transparency and flexibility. Intrigued? Join us!
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