Engineering Manager, Pathstream
$128-183k
Salary dependent on location
React
AWS
Docker
TypeScript
JavaScript
Python
Postgres
Ruby on Rails
Senior and Expert level
Remote from US
Web-based platform for teaching tech skills
Be an early applicant
Web-based platform for teaching tech skills
21-100 employees
B2CEducationTraining
Be an early applicant
$128-183k
Salary dependent on location
React
AWS
Docker
TypeScript
JavaScript
Python
Postgres
Ruby on Rails
Senior and Expert level
Remote from US
21-100 employees
B2CEducationTraining
Company mission
To change the future of careers.
Role
Who you are
- We are looking for someone who has built a strong foundation as an engineer, highly proficient in one or more technical areas, and is now energized by multiplying their impact through others. Growing the engineers on their team, owning their team's roadmap, and turning company strategy into well-sequenced, well-executed engineering work
- You bring 4+ years of professional software engineering experience and are highly proficient in one or more technical areas, with the range to be effective across many others
- You have 2+ years leading and mentoring engineers — as a team lead, technical lead, or engineering manager — and a demonstrated track record of developing engineering talent
- You have owned the technical design and delivery of broadly scoped work end-to-end — a major refactor, a new service, or a comparably impactful initiative — and been independently responsible for the full delivery process in your area
- You bring a deep understanding of scalability best practices and experience designing and implementing solutions that can handle significant growth
- You bring familiarity with modern web application stacks similar to ours: Ruby on Rails, React, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Docker, PostgreSQL, and AWS
- You understand infrastructure automation, platform security, and DevOps practices, and you are comfortable with the discipline of operating production systems that hold customer data. Practical experience with security and compliance in a SaaS environment (SOC2, vulnerability management, authentication) is a plus
- You are hands-on with modern AI-enabled development tools and agentic engineering approaches and bring genuine enthusiasm and the drive to grow production experience with them quickly
- You embrace change introduced by evolving technology, set ambitious goals, and proactively seek feedback on your own areas of growth
- You have practical judgment about when AI accelerates engineering work and when it introduces risk, and you can articulate that distinction to your team
- You lead through influence and trust rather than authority. You are sought out for technical and people feedback because of your thorough, helpful advice and your kind, respectful communication
- You communicate with clarity, brevity, and focus, and you are effective in crucial conversations even when they are uncomfortable. You can translate technical concepts into language that is understood and useful across teams, adapting your message for different audiences
- You drive discussions with product and other stakeholders that turn ambiguous problem statements into clear engineering requirements, and you work productively through challenging conversations when constraints conflict
- You are comfortable operating in environments with ambiguity and shifting priorities, and you bring a proactive, data-informed approach to decision-making even when perfect information is unavailable
- You bring others along rather than working in a silo. You are a steadying force for your team, you invest deeply in the engineers around you, you celebrate the wins of others, and you treat disagreement as a collaboration tool rather than a contest to win. You see managing a team as the way to multiply your impact
What the job involves
- Pathstream is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead one of our engineering pods, a team of 4+ engineers building and maintaining the platform that powers our learning and workforce-development products
- This is a people management role reporting to the SVP of Engineering: you will own the growth, performance, and effectiveness of your team, while staying technical enough to set direction within your domain, drive delivery of broadly scoped initiatives, and hold a high bar on quality
- A core expectation of this role is to champion Pathstream's AI-native engineering practices within your team
- AI adoption is already deeply embedded in how we build software at Pathstream
- We are looking for a manager who actively drives the effective and responsible adoption of AI-enabled development tools on their team, and who coaches engineers to get real leverage from them
- PEOPLE LEADERSHIP & TEAM CRAFT:
- Directly manage a team of 4+ engineers. Own their growth and performance end-to-end — regular 1:1s, growth plans, performance reviews, compensation recommendations, and timely, candid feedback. Run performance cycles in partnership with your manager, navigating the most sensitive situations with support from senior leadership
- Own hiring for your team. Partner with recruiting to scope roles, run interview loops, and play a central role in evaluating engineering candidates and shaping hiring decisions. Build a team with clear roles, healthy collaboration patterns, and strong engagement, and take ownership of improving the experience of more junior members of the team
- Deliver feedback proactively and partner on solutions. Offer timely, unprompted feedback that integrates new context as it emerges, co-create next steps with the recipient, and know when escalation is appropriate
- Develop engineering talent. Demonstrate success in growing engineers, and establish formal mentoring relationships with more junior engineers — through pairing, design feedback, and code review
- Be a steadying force and a positive influence. Provide team stability through priority and business shifts, bring everyone into the conversation, advocate for the growth and success of others, and publicly celebrate the achievements of your teammates
- TECHNICAL DIRECTION & EXECUTION:
- Define and own your team's roadmap and technical direction. Influence team priorities to match business objectives, lead service-level planning and technical strategy discussions, and translate company strategy into sequenced, well-scoped engineering work
- Own planning and prioritization for large initiatives. In partnership with leadership, estimate and manage timelines and risk, define success criteria, bring teammates along throughout the planning process, and sequence work so it can be spread efficiently across multiple people
- Guide your team through ambiguous, broadly scoped work — major refactors, new services, and other impactful changes — driving end-to-end resolution of complex problems by drawing on both established and new techniques
- Maintain strong technical proficiency. Stay highly proficient in one or more technical areas and effective across a wide range, with a deep enough understanding of your team's systems to contribute across its entire domain of ownership. Take ownership of transferring knowledge to less-experienced teammates to support scalability and reduce single points of failure
- Hold a high quality bar. Identify where code structure and architecture can be improved for testability and maintainability and bring well-formed proposals to the team. Provide thorough, constructive code review that goes beyond functionality to how code should be structured for future reliability and maintainability
- Make pragmatic trade-offs. Make sound, informed decisions about technical debt and velocity, and proactively call out when a plan must change mid-project, recommending a new approach based on current priorities
- Ensure technical documentation accounts for stability, performance, scalability, and business needs, and review your team's documents constructively without being nitpicky
- AI & AGENTIC ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP:
- Champion AI-native engineering on your team. Ensure your engineers are adopting AI-enabled development tools (Claude Code) effectively and responsibly, in line with Pathstream's internal AI guardrails
- Coach your team on how to collaborate well with AI systems, when to use which tool, and how to evaluate AI-generated output
- Embrace change introduced by evolving technology. Partner with engineering leadership to roll out and refine AI tooling, workflows, and standards across the org, and help your team turn new capabilities into real, measurable leverage
- Stay hands-on enough to be credible. You use these tools in your own work and can speak from practical experience about what works, what doesn't, and why
- PLATFORM HEALTH, SECURITY & OPERATIONS:
- Ensure your team operates production systems well. Participate in on-call, including, with support, code outside your team's normal responsibility and use observability tooling to catch issues before they affect customers
- Partner with engineering leadership on security and compliance in your domain, including SOC2, vulnerability management, authentication systems, and the controls that protect Pathstream's enterprise customers and learners
- Translate operational pain and on-call insights into roadmap priorities and process improvements, and ensure your team maintains sound DevOps and operational practices across infrastructure, APIs, automation, and deployment pipelines
Our take
Applicant Tracking Systems are frequently used by companies to filter out resumes that do not include essential skills. However, University degrees often focus on generalized skill sets as opposed to career-critical skills, resulting in many strong candidates slipping through the cracks.
Pathstream builds optimized digital skill programs for job seekers by partnering with companies and educational institutions, with programs designed in collaboration with companies including Salesforce, Facebook and Tableau. The startup's aim is to deliver courses in career-critical skill sets to ensure applicants have all the necessary skills relevant to their career path.
Pathstream believes that degrees in the US still focus too much on qualifications in antiquated skill sets. It does not want to replace educational institutes, but partner with them to teach platform-centric and industry-critical skill sets. Strong funding and a good initial reach will support this aim moving forward.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Led by a woman
Top investors
-9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jun 2023
$38.8m
LATE VC
Aug 2019
$12m
SERIES A
Total funding: $51.8m
Company HQ
Union Square, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Eleanor Cooper
(Co-Founder & CEO)Worked at Morgan Stanley as an Investment Banking Analyst. Was a Private Equity Investment Associate at Energy Capital Partner, and New Venture Lead at Entangled Ventures.
Lauren Pizer
(Co-Founder & SVP of Learning Experience)Was a Special Projects Associate at Explore Schools, Teaching Team Member at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, and Director of Student Experience at MissionU. Was also Case Team Leader at Entangled Ventures.
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