Engineering Manager 1

As an Engineering Manager - 1 at Porter, you will lead a team of engineers responsible for building and operating business-critical systems at scale. This is a high-ownership role for someone who enjoys staying close to technology while also driving execution, developing people, and creating business impact.
Responsibilities:
Leading a small engineering team with clarity, ownership, and empathy.
Driving predictable delivery across multiple projects.
Guiding technical decisions across HLD, LLD, reliability, and scale.
Ensuring systems are observable, reliable, and production-ready.
Partnering with Product, Business, Data, and Operations to solve real user problems.
Building a strong engineering culture within your team.
Lead High-Impact Engineering Execution:
You will convert ambiguous business and product goals into clear engineering plans.
You will define milestones, owners, dependencies, risks, and success metrics.
You will drive execution rhythm, surface risks early, and ensure your team delivers with predictability and quality.
You will balance speed, scope, quality, reliability, and cost while keeping business impact at the center.
Guide Technical Direction:
You will work closely with engineers to shape strong technical solutions.
You will review HLDs and LLDs, challenge assumptions, identify reliability and scale gaps, and help the team make sound trade-offs.
You are not expected to write every line of code, but you are expected to raise the quality of technical decision-making.
Own Operational Excellence:
You will be accountable for the operational health of systems owned by your team.
You will drive SLOs, dashboards, alerts, incident management, postmortems, rollout planning, and production readiness.
At Porter's scale, launch is not the finish line. Systems need to run reliably after they are shipped.
Build and Grow Your Team:
You will manage, coach, and develop engineers.
You will set clear expectations, provide regular feedback, help people grow in scope, and handle difficult conversations with empathy and clarity.
You will create a team environment where engineers feel trusted, accountable, and motivated to do high-quality work.
Create Business Impact:
You will work closely with Product, Business, Data, and Operations to connect engineering execution with real-world outcomes.
Your team's work will directly impact customers, driver partners, marketplace reliability, operational efficiency, and cost.
You will not just manage engineering work.
You will solve business problems through engineering teams.
Requirements:
8+ years of overall engineering experience.
Prior experience managing or directly leading engineers.
Strong hands-on engineering background, preferably in backend, platform, marketplace, or distributed systems.
Experience driving delivery across multiple projects or workstreams.
Experience operating in fast-paced, high-ownership environments.
Exposure to systems running at meaningful production scale.
Technical Judgment:
You should be able to:
Review HLDs and LLDs with depth.
Reason about APIs, service boundaries, data models, scale, reliability, and failure modes.
Identify design gaps before they become production issues.
Partner effectively with senior engineers and architects.
Balance technical quality with business urgency.
Execution Strength:
You should be strong at:
Breaking complex goals into clear plans.
Managing risks, dependencies, and trade-offs.
Driving alignment across Product, Business, Data, Ops, and Engineering.
Communicating status, risks, and decisions crisply.
Maintaining momentum through ambiguity and changing priorities.
People Leadership:
You should bring:
Strong ownership of team outcomes.
Ability to coach and grow engineers.
Clear and constructive feedback style.
Empathy with accountability.
Ability to build trust, resolve conflict, and raise the team's performance bar.
Mindset:
We value leaders who demonstrate:
Own It take accountability for outcomes.
Keep Moving: act with urgency and clarity in ambiguity.
User Obsession understand real customer and business impact.
Collaborate to Win work well across teams and functions.
Empathy Driven support for people while maintaining high standards.

Experience
8-11 yrs