Manager, Engineering

Our Payments team builds the platform that moves real money between school districts, families, and payment partners nationwide. Every transaction matters — a parent loading lunch money before the bell, a cafeteria terminal charging at the register, a nightly settlement landing in a district's bank account. Reliability, accuracy, and financial integrity aren't features - they're the floor. We're building the next generation of K-12 payments, giving districts confidence in their funds and families a seamless way to pay for what their students rely on every day.

As an Engineering Manager for Payments, you will lead the engineering team(s) that own the payment engine and admin tooling behind LINQ's payments platform - the software responsible for moving real money between school districts, families, and LINQ's payment partners. You'll partner closely with the Sr. Director of Engineering, senior engineers on your team, and Product leadership to ship software where reliability, data accuracy, and operational rigor are non-negotiable.

This is a player/coach role that leans firmly toward coach. Roughly 80% of your time is spent leading people - hiring, coaching, unblocking, raising the bar, and driving delivery - and the remaining time is spent where a manager's technical leverage is highest: architecture and design reviews, high-stakes code review, pairing on hard problems, and jumping into the code when production needs you. You're not here to pick up sprint tickets, but you are close enough to the code that your engineers trust your technical instincts and you can carry real weight during an incident - which matters more in payments than almost anywhere else.

• →Lead and grow a team of engineers across a blended FTE/contractor model - running meaningful 1:1s, writing growth plans, managing performance honestly, and giving direct, kind, actionable feedback
• →Own delivery outcomes for the Payments platform - partnering with Product to shape the work, not just receive it, and driving predictable, high-quality execution
• →Partner with the Sr. Director of Engineering and your engineers to shape and execute the technical roadmap - balancing new product capabilities, infrastructure modernization, and platform reliability
• →Keep operational excellence front and center - reconciliation, webhook resilience, retry and idempotency patterns, and data accuracy in the face of third-party outages are the baseline expectation, not a stretch goal
• →Raise the hiring bar and own the hiring loop for your team - sourcing, interview calibration, and closing talent
• →Contribute as a technical leader in ADRs, design reviews, and high-stakes code reviews; weigh in on tradeoffs with enough depth that your technical voice genuinely sharpens the work
• →Drive healthy engineering practices - testing discipline, CI/CD, DORA/flow metrics, and incident response - using evidence to guide improvement rather than opinion alone
• →Enable the team to adopt AI-assisted development tooling (Claude Code) effectively and responsibly, modeling the practices yourself
• →Cultivate a culture where engineers are confident to change code - when people are afraid to touch something, we move slowly and we break things, and in payments that has a direct financial consequence
• →Communicate up, across, and down clearly in writing - roadmaps, status, risks, tradeoffs, and decisions

• 3+ years managing software engineering teams, with a track record of shipping production software at quality
• Experience managing mixed FTE and contractor teams - with a clear sense of where those management approaches converge and diverge
• Strong technical background in Node.js and modern JavaScript/TypeScript service development; you've shipped real systems and are sharp enough to contribute credibly in design and code reviews
• Comfort with Angular or a close-adjacent modern front-end framework
• Hands-on experience leading teams that build payments, fintech, or other integration-heavy systems where data accuracy, idempotency, and reconciliation with external systems are core concerns
• Evidence-based management approach - familiar with DORA, SPACE, or equivalent frameworks, and honest about their limits

• Production experience working in AWS environments; comfortable reasoning about container-based deployment (ECS/EKS), serverless services, and managed databases
• Experience leading teams through infrastructure modernization (e.g., containerization migrations) without disrupting delivery

• Familiarity with payment gateway integrations, tokenization, settlement flows, and dispute/chargeback management
• Understanding of PCI DSS scope reduction strategies and the operational realities of relying on tokenization vendors
• Demonstrated experience hardening integrations with unreliable third-party systems - webhook handling, reconciliation jobs, eventual consistency, and graceful degradation

• Hands-on user of Claude Code, Cursor, or similar AI-assisted coding environments
• Able to coach a team on effective, responsible use of AI tooling — and honest about where it works and where it doesn't

• Coaching-first instinct - you default to asking before telling, and help people think clearly rather than thinking for them
• Direct communicator - you can challenge respectfully, escalate clearly, and write a crisp exec update
• Fluent in Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD practices

• Experience in payments, payroll processing, fintech, or K-12 EdTech
• Background managing teams that operate high-transaction-volume, real-money-movement systems
• Experience running blended onshore/offshore or FTE/contractor engineering teams at scale
• Experience splitting or merging teams as organizational scope evolves
• Hands-on experience with terminal/EMV or in-person payment integrations
• Experience launching hosted checkout, embedded payments, or PSP-style products
• Contributions to engineering excellence programs, management communities of practice, or internal leadership development