Engineering Manager (Platform)

Think about the last time you tried to book a tennis court. Or sign your kid up for a swim lesson. Or find an open rec league that actually fits your schedule. You probably ended up on a website that looked like it was built in 2003 — or even worse, filled out a piece of paper.

$3T is spent on recreation globally, and it's built on a completely fragmented system that's largely untouched by technology.

At Rec (recreation.ai), we're using AI to change that — reimagining how the world plays, participates in community, and gets active. Our vision is simple: more recreation for everyone. We sit at a rare intersection — a consumer product loved by everyday players and an enterprise platform trusted by the organizations that power recreation.

We're a small team with firepower. Our founders were among the first few hundred at Uber, then led teams at The Athletic and MasterClass. The rest of the team combines builders from Google, Microsoft, Strava, Hipcamp, and Airbnb.

People join Rec for two reasons: you want to build AI that gets people back in the real world, and you want to work with really smart people.

As Rec scales across America, enters new markets, and processes hundreds of millions in revenue for our partners, the Platform team is what makes that possible. You'll own the foundation.

Platform spans Payments & Finance, Systems Infrastructure and DevEx/QA. It's the systems that keep Rec reliable, the money that moves correctly, and the tooling that lets our engineers ship with confidence. You'll lead a team of 4–6 engineers across all three areas, with a clear path to splitting teams as the team grows.

The job requires equal parts technical credibility and people leadership. You'll stay close to the code: reviewing, triaging bugs, and fixing things where it makes sense. You set the quality bar through your own standards. On the people side, you're coaching engineers, running the hiring loop for your team, and partnering with Product to shape an ambitious roadmap.

Team Leadership

• Manage a team of 4–6 engineers across Payments & Finance, Systems Infrastructure and DevEx/QA. Run 1:1s, give real performance feedback, and invest in their careers.

• Run the hiring loop for your team. Source, evaluate, and close the engineers who will raise our bar.

• Build a culture on the Platform team where reliability is a first-class value, quality is the default, and engineers feel ownership over what they ship.

Technical Direction

• Set and hold the technical bar through code reviews, architecture decisions, and the willingness to say "we're not shipping this" when it's not ready.

• Stay close to the code. Review regularly, triage bugs, and fix things where it makes sense. Know what your team is building well enough to spot problems before they become incidents.

• Own the technical direction for Platform: database scaling as transaction volume grows, reliability of the payments flow, and reducing friction for engineers building on top of the foundation you own.

• Use AI tools fluently across your workflow.

Execution & Roadmap

• Partner with Product to shape the Platform roadmap. Translate business priorities (new markets, partner onboardings, compliance requirements) into engineering work that's scoped and sequenced.

• Own sprint execution for your team. Keep the team moving, surface blockers early, and make sure the team's commitments are ones it can keep.

• Drive launch readiness for major releases that depend on Platform: load testing, capacity planning, and go/no-go decisions.

• 5+ years as a software engineer, including 4+ years managing engineering teams.

• You have experience or interest in building payments systems.

• You're fired up by the mission.

• AI fluency is non-negotiable.

• You've managed engineers who were as good or better than you technically, and made them better.

• You raise the bar by example. Strong opinions on code quality, reliability, and what "done" actually means. The kind of person who writes the code review comment that changes how someone codes permanently.

• You have good instincts for roadmap tradeoffs and can translate a business goal into a technical plan without losing the intent.

• You've hired engineers before. You know how to build and run a loop, and you take pride in your hit rate.

• You communicate clearly, candidly, and constructively with your team, with product, and with leadership.

• You thrive in ambiguity and don't wait for perfect information to make a call.

• Experience with payments infrastructure (Stripe or similar), platform reliability work, or developer tooling is a plus. Deep expertise in one area of Platform is more valuable than shallow familiarity across all three.

• Frontend: Next.js (hosted on Vercel), React, TypeScript

• Backend: Node.js, Koa, Objection.js, PostgreSQL

• Infra & Ops: AWS, Temporal, Twilio, Stripe

• AI & Tooling: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent.

• Be Relentless. Move fast. Own it. Ship real value early and often.

• Win Together. Speak up, go beyond the boundaries of your role. That's how we win.

• Take Pride. Treat this like it's yours — because it is.

• Benefits: Flexible PTO, top-tier health/dental/vision, 401(k).

• Work location: San Francisco in-office