Job Description:
Lower is building technology that powers digital mortgage, home finance, automation, and AI-powered experiences across the homeownership journey.
As an Engineering Manager, you’ll lead a team of software engineers responsible for designing, building, and operating high-quality software across Lower’s engineering organization. You’ll be accountable for the performance, development, delivery, and health of your team while remaining technically engaged enough to guide engineering decisions, review designs, and help remove technical roadblocks.
This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who combines strong people management with deep software engineering experience. You’ll work closely with Software Engineers, Product, Design, QA, and engineering leadership to translate business priorities into clear technical plans, develop engineers at different stages of their careers, and ensure your team delivers reliable software effectively.
You’ll help create an environment where engineers have clear expectations, strong technical support, thoughtful feedback, and the autonomy needed to do their best work.
Work Location: Hybrid in Columbus, OH
Work Type: Full-time W2 employment, visa sponsorship is not available for this position at this time.
What you’ll do:
People Leadership & Team Development
- People management: Lead and develop a team of software engineers through regular 1:1s, coaching, feedback, goal setting, and performance management.
- Career development: Help engineers understand expectations at their level, identify development opportunities, and build actionable plans for continued growth.
- Performance management: Set clear expectations, recognize strong performance, address performance gaps directly and constructively, and lead formal performance review processes.
- Team health: Build an inclusive, accountable, and supportive team environment where engineers can collaborate effectively and do their best work.
- Hiring & onboarding: Partner with recruiting and engineering leadership to evaluate talent, hire strong engineers, and successfully onboard new team members.
- Resource management: Align engineering capacity and individual strengths with team priorities, assigning ownership in a way that supports both delivery and employee development.
Technical Leadership
- Technical direction: Partner with Senior and Staff Engineers to guide technical decisions, architecture, and implementation approaches within the team.
- Technical credibility: Stay sufficiently close to the code and systems to participate meaningfully in design discussions, code reviews, debugging, and technical problem solving.
- Code & design review: Help maintain a high engineering bar through thoughtful review of code, system designs, architectural decisions, and implementation approaches.
- Engineering quality: Ensure the team maintains strong practices around testing, reliability, security, observability, maintainability, and production support.
- Technical problem solving: Help engineers navigate complex technical issues, escalate concerns appropriately, and bring in the right partners when problems span systems or teams.
- Tooling, automation & AI-assisted development: Encourage effective use of automation and AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity, code quality, debugging, testing, documentation, and delivery.
Delivery & Execution
- Team delivery: Own the team’s ability to deliver high-quality software predictably while balancing business priorities, technical quality, and sustainable engineering practices.
- Planning & prioritization: Partner with Product and engineering leadership to translate priorities into clear plans, appropriately scoped work, and realistic delivery expectations.
- Project execution: Track progress, surface risks and dependencies early, and help the team adjust plans when scope, complexity, or business priorities change.
- Risk management: Identify technical debt, delivery risks, capacity constraints, dependencies, and operational concerns before they become blockers.
- Organizational unblocker: Remove technical, process, prioritization, and coordination barriers that prevent engineers from delivering effectively.
- Operational ownership: Ensure the team effectively supports the systems it owns through monitoring, incident response, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement.
Collaboration and Engineering Leadership
- Cross-functional partnership: Work closely with Product, Design, QA, business stakeholders, and other engineering teams to align priorities and deliver solutions that meet both customer and technical needs.
- Stakeholder communication: Clearly communicate team priorities, progress, risks, tradeoffs, and technical considerations to both technical and non-technical partners.
- Engineering alignment: Partner with other Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers, and engineering leadership to coordinate dependencies and maintain consistency across teams.
- Mentorship & feedback: Provide engineers with clear, timely, and actionable feedback while fostering a culture where feedback moves openly in all directions.
- Continuous improvement: Identify opportunities to improve team processes, engineering practices, developer workflows, and organizational effectiveness.
- Engineering culture: Model collaborative technical leadership, healthy debate, accountability, curiosity, and respect across the engineering organization.
Who you are:
- Meaningful experience leading or managing software engineers.
- People leadership experience with demonstrated success coaching engineers, managing performance, providing feedback, and supporting career development.
- Strong technical background with experience designing, building, and operating modern production software.
- Experience leading engineering teams responsible for complex web applications, backend services, APIs, distributed systems, or comparable technical environments.
- Experience with modern programming languages and technologies such as TypeScript, React, Node.js, C#/.NET, Go, AWS, Postgres, or comparable technologies, with the ability to quickly learn new languages, frameworks, and tools.
- Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, system design, testing, CI/CD, observability, security, and modern software delivery practices.
- Ability to remain technically engaged while empowering engineers to own implementation and technical decisions appropriate to their level.
- Experience partnering with Product and other cross-functional stakeholders to prioritize work, manage tradeoffs, and deliver against business goals.
- Demonstrated ability to manage competing priorities, dependencies, ambiguity, and changing business needs.
- Experience leveraging or supporting the use of AI-assisted software development tools to improve engineering productivity and delivery.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills—someone who brings strong opinions held loosely, engages debate without ego, gives and receives feedback constructively, and helps foster a supportive engineering culture. We’re looking for someone people want to design and work alongside.
Nice to have:
- Experience managing teams in a high-growth or rapidly evolving engineering organization.
- Experience managing Senior or Staff-level engineers.
- Experience leading teams across multiple technical stacks or domains.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and services such as AWS.
- Experience with distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, or high-scale web applications.
- Experience supporting AI-enabled products, LLM applications, or AI-assisted engineering workflows.
- Experience in fintech, mortgage, lending, financial services, or another regulated industry.