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.

Who You Are

You’re an AI-native, hands-on, mission-driven engineering leader who thrives at the intersection of product, people, execution, and cutting-edge tooling. You take ownership—not just of outcomes, but of team health and culture. You strive to use AI tooling throughout your team’s processes and practices to deliver value to customers. You’re passionate about building high-quality software, coaching engineers, and making decisions that balance long-term customer value with fast, iterative delivery. You push for excellence, act decisively, and never lose sight of the impact your team can have.

You will succeed in this role if you are:

• Driven by outcomes. You care about helping preschools and childcare centers stay full, save time, and serve children and families better – not just about shipping “an AI feature.”

• AI-native. You treat AI as part of your toolchain: you rely on modern AI assistants and IDEs and lightweight automation or orchestration tools to move dramatically faster, and you know when AI adds real leverage versus when a simple service or query is enough.

• A product-driving technical leader. You don’t wait for perfect requirements — you validate hypotheses with prototypes, talk to customers and internal teams, define success metrics, and use working software to align others and drive decisions.

• A calm and resilient leader. You guide and motivate your team through ambiguity, change, and competing priorities. You bring clarity and focus during high-stakes moments while maintaining trust, transparency, and team morale.

• Thoughtful about AI’s limits. You understand hallucinations, safety, and evaluation, and you design data flows, UX, and guardrails around those constraints rather than ignoring them.

• Security-minded. You handle sensitive school, educator, and family data with care and instinctively look for secure designs and least-privilege access patterns.

What You’ll Do

• Get to use AI in every aspect of your role

• Lead a high-performing, full-stack team to deliver key product outcomes with quality and urgency

• Collaborate with Product and Design to shape roadmap priorities, technical tradeoffs, and delivery plans

• Leverage AI and automation to meaningfully improve engineering velocity and operational excellence

• Grow and develop a team of engineers through regular coaching, feedback, and mentorship

• Drive a high bar for execution, quality, and delivery—ensuring consistency across planning cycles

• Help define and influence broader engineering best practices and systems as part of our Engineering Leadership team

• Champion customer-centric decision making, ensuring every build aligns to real user needs

What You’ve Done

• 4+ years of engineering management experience, with a track record of shipping complex, high-impact software

• Proven success leading cross-functional teams in a fast-paced, product-centric environment

• Leveraged AI tools and workflows to increase team velocity, quality, and operational excellence (e.g., development, testing, debugging, documentation, incident response).

• Strong technical background; able to assess architecture, guide design decisions, and remove blockers

• Experience coaching Senior and Staff level engineers and helping them grow

• Demonstrated ability to move fast, prioritize ruthlessly, and deliver results

• Passion for using AI and tooling to unlock team leverage and elevate quality

• Strong customer empathy—you advocate for their needs in every sprint, spec, and system

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.