Senior Engineering Manager

Our Mission and Opportunity

Early education is one of the most important determinants of childhood outcomes, a critical support for working families, and a $175B market that remains underserved by modern technology. Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day. We are a three-time Cloud 100 company, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban.

Our Team

Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. We embody our Leadership Principles in our work and culture. We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally.

About the role

In this role, you will lead a team building AI-powered systems for brightwheel’s go-to-market organization. This is a hands-on, cross-functional role: you’ll lead discovery, prototype workflows, and validate them with internal users rather than wait for perfectly defined requirements or dedicated Product and Design support. You’ll work directly with Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Operations, and Data to turn ambiguous business problems into reliable products and workflows. The work spans internal products, Salesforce and data integrations, evaluation systems, and customer-facing automation.

You’ll use metrics to decide where to invest, stay close enough to architecture and implementation to form an independent view, and step into prototypes or critical-path code when it helps the team move faster. You won’t wait for perfect requirements: you’ll create clarity, make tradeoffs explicit, and stay accountable through production.

What you’ll do

• Lead a full-stack engineering team from problem definition through production, measurement, and iteration.

• Translate company goals into clear outcomes, investment choices, and a credible execution plan.

• Set the engineering strategy for quality, reliability, security, privacy, and operational health.

• Ship AI-powered products and change how the team works with AI—not just add AI features.

• Hire and develop strong engineers, set a clear bar, and act when the team or an individual is below it.

• Make capacity, dependencies, forecasts, and risks visible early.

• Work directly with GTM and Operations leaders to identify the real problem, map the workflow, prototype a usable solution, and define how success will be measured before scaling.

• Build internal products and AI workflows that improve revenue, conversion, productivity, or quality; measure adoption and results.

• Own cross-system execution across Salesforce, data, product, and AI services, with clear dependencies and decision rights.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have led an engineering team that delivered measurable customer or business results.

• Have the technical depth to challenge architecture, product, data, reliability, and operational decisions without taking the work away from the team.

• Have set engineering strategy and made explicit investment and prioritization choices.

• Have shipped an AI-powered product or workflow to production and can explain the measurable result.

• Have hired and developed strong engineers, built succession, and handled performance issues directly.

• Have built trusted partnerships across Product, Design, and business teams while representing a clear Engineering point of view.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience in vertical SaaS, education, fintech, healthcare, CRM, ecommerce, or another operations-heavy domain.

• Led a material change in product direction, architecture, or operating model.

• Built production AI products, agents, evaluation systems, or automation.

• Experience leading engineering for internal business functions and working directly with senior stakeholders.

• Strong product intuition and UX empathy; can represent Product and Design for small bets and fast iterations when dedicated support is limited.

• Experience connecting CRM, data, integration, and AI systems into reliable workflows that move a business metric.

Technology

• Backend: Python with FastAPI and asynchronous workers; React with TypeScript.

• Data and systems: PostgreSQL, Redshift, DynamoDB, Airflow, Salesforce, and service integrations.

• Cloud: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and production observability.

• AI and automation: foundation models, evaluation and orchestration tooling, vector search, and modern AI coding tools.

Brightwheel is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

Protecting Our Applicants: Please be aware of recruiting scams impersonating Brightwheel. All legitimate communications come from @mybrightwheel.com addresses, and we never ask for payment or sensitive personal data as part of our hiring process. If you suspect fraudulent contact, reach out to [email protected]. Thank you for helping us keep our applicant community safe.