Software Engineering Manager

About SkillUp 

Founded in July 2020, SkillUp Coalition is an innovative nonprofit connecting more than 4 million individuals skilled through alternative routes (STARs) with the right tools, resources, and support to make confident career shifts, find quality living-wage jobs, and achieve promising career growth without the need of a college degree. 

Through its cutting-edge technology platform and step-by-step career guidance options, SkillUp has connected STARs with career, training, and job support nationwide. The coalition brings together more than 150 leading organizations, including training and education providers, technology developers, policymakers, employers, and philanthropies. 

SkillUp is a remote-first organization rooted deeply in our values to Champion Worker-First, Empower Impact, Embrace Collaboration, Exemplify Curiosity, and Embody Accountability. By 2030, we plan to serve 10 million users and help more than 1 million workers and learners attain quality employment.
 

Overview

SkillUp is seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead a small, high-impact engineering team responsible for building and maintaining the technology platform that powers career navigation for millions of STARs. This is a player-coach role — you'll spend roughly half your time writing code and the other half leading people, shaping architecture, and driving engineering operations. You'll report directly to the SVP of Product and partner closely with our Sr. Principal AI Engineer, who is directing the development of new agentic AI-powered products.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on engineering leader who thrives in lean, mission-driven environments. You're comfortable making architecture decisions, managing nearshore and contract engineers, running DevOps operations, and rolling up your sleeves to ship code — all in the same week. You bring experience integrating existing products with modern generative AI capabilities and understand how to build reliable, scalable systems without over-engineering for a 20+ person team nonprofit.

This role is critical to SkillUp's 2030 plan to serve 10 million users. You'll help evolve our platform from its current state into an AI-enhanced career guidance ecosystem, building the engineering foundation and team culture needed to support that growth.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture & Technical Leadership — Own platform architecture decisions across the full stack (MongoDB, APIs, Azure/GCP). Partner with the Sr. Principal AI Engineer on integration patterns between existing products and new agentic AI capabilities. Establish and enforce engineering standards, code review practices, and technical documentation.
• Hands-On Software Development — Contribute directly to the codebase ~50% of the time, building features, fixing bugs, and reducing technical debt. Leverage modern agentic development tools and practices to maximize team velocity and output quality.
• Engineering Operations & DevOps — Lead CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and incident response. Build and manage on-call rotation schedules ensuring platform reliability. Own cloud infrastructure management across Azure and GCP.
• Security & Compliance — Ensure security best practices across the platform, including data protection, access controls, and vulnerability management. Support compliance requirements related to grant-funded projects and sensitive user data handling.
• People & Vendor Leadership — Hire, manage, and mentor an engineering team (engineers, qa, devops), fostering growth, accountability, and a culture of collaboration and inclusivity. Manage nearshore and contract engineering resources including scoping, quality oversight, on-time delivery and vendor relationships. Champion SkillUp's core values: Champion Worker-First, Empower Impact, Embrace Collaboration, Exemplify Curiosity, and Embody Accountability.

Qualifications 

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years in an engineering management role.
• Demonstrated experience designing and owning system architecture for web and mobile platforms, including API design, data modeling, and cloud infrastructure.
• Hands-on proficiency across the full stack, including web and mobile — you can debug a production database issue in the morning and review a front-end or mobile PR in the afternoon.
• Experience managing nearshore and/or contract engineering teams, including vendor relationships, SOWs, and quality oversight.
• Strong DevOps and platform reliability experience, including CI/CD, monitoring/alerting, infrastructure-as-code, and on-call rotation management.
• Experience with Azure and/or GCP cloud environments.
• Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities (particularly generative AI or agentic AI products) into existing platforms. (Strongly Preferred)
• Familiarity with modern agentic software development workflows and tools. (Strongly Preferred)
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent. (Preferred)
• Experience working in nonprofit, mission-driven, or grant-funded organizations. (Preferred)
• Entrepreneurial mindset — comfortable navigating complexity and identifying new opportunities.

And while all of the above qualifications are important, there are three demonstrated capabilities most important for this job, and they are (blatantly borrowed from Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn):

• Dream Big
• Get Sh*t Done
• Know How to Have Fun

Compensation & Benefits 

Target salary for this position is $130,000 - $180,000, depending on experience, geography, and Internal equity.

SkillUp offers a generous compensation package which includes employer-sponsored healthcare, vision and dental, 401K employer match, 25 days of office closure, PTO, education stipend, and annual salary increases based on performance.

Our Commitment to Diversity 

At SkillUp, our mission is to help workers get hired for in-demand jobs in high-growth industries. Success in this mission requires that we don’t just accept differences, but that we celebrate and embrace the diverse community and backgrounds individuals come from. We stay true to our mission by ensuring that our place can be anyone’s place, and we embrace diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. 

As a proud equal opportunity employer, SkillUp does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state or federal law or local ordinance.