Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager, Core Product Engineering

Skillshare is the leading learning community for creatives, empowering hundreds of thousands of members globally to learn new skills in illustration, design, photography, video, and marketing. Backed by top investors, our mission is to build the world’s most thriving creative learning community.

We are seeking an experienced and passionate Engineering Manager to lead one of our core product engineering teams. This critical leadership role involves guiding our strategic transition toward a modern, scalable architecture. You will shape the technical direction and delivery of our product while fostering a high-performance, collaborative team culture. Success requires balancing strong technical expertise, strategic vision, and a deep commitment to mentoring engineers in a fast-paced environment.

Key Engineering Leadership Responsibilities

• Team Leadership & Growth: Directly manage, mentor, and coach a team of engineers and tech leads, focusing on career development, performance management, and skill enhancement.
• Engineering Strategy & Reliability: Collaborate with Engineering Leadership to define the team’s vision, strategy, and roadmap. Own application health and reliability, leading the prioritization of technical debt and ensuring adherence to SRE principles for monitoring and incident response.
• Execution & Delivery Management: Partner closely with Product and Design teams to translate high-level concepts into well-defined projects, ensuring high-quality, on-time delivery from conception through production.
• Agile Process Champion: Maintain rigorous documentation and definition of all work within tooling (e.g., Jira), ensuring clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and accurate real-time status updates.
• Quality Standards: Champion best practices for code quality, architectural standards, performance, and accessibility across the codebase. Actively participate in pull request reviews and technical discussions.
• Recruitment & Scaling: Play a critical role in growing the engineering team by recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding talented new members.
• Technical Vision: Help the team balance execution speed with building for long-term scalability and maintainability.

Required Skills and Experience

• 6+ years of professional experience building highly scalable web applications.
• 2+ years of direct experience managing, mentoring, and developing software engineers.
• Demonstrated expertise in Agile frameworks, particularly Scrum, with a proven track record of driving execution and delivery predictability.
• Strong technical foundation and comfort guiding teams using our core stack: PHP, GraphQL, TypeScript, and React.
• Proven experience managing application reliability and operational health, including strategic prioritization of technical debt and upholding SRE or DevOps principles.
• Expertise in managing project workflow within tools like Jira, including defining detailed user stories and conducting accurate capacity planning.
• Extensive technical experience building and operating consumer-facing web applications at scale.
• Proven ability to collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, and other business stakeholders.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, capable of articulating technical decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

• Previous experience in a high-growth startup environment.
• Experience at a B2C subscription-based company dealing with rapid user growth and retention challenges.
• Familiarity with payments processing systems (e.g., Stripe, Adyen) and related security/compliance best practices.
• Familiarity with modern deployment practices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience utilizing AI tooling to improve daily workflows.
• A track record of contributing to community best practices (e.g., accessibility, performance optimization).

Skillshare Benefits and Culture

We offer a passionate, creative, and innovative team environment focused on a meaningful mission. We prioritize flexibility and work-life balance, offering:

• Unlimited PTO (with a required minimum)
• Gender-neutral parental leave
• Anniversary sabbaticals
• Healthy stipends for creativity, learning, and personal wellness
• Support for remote teams, including home office stipends and co-working spaces.
• Direct impact on millions of students and teachers.