Talent Network: Engineering Manager

Job Summary:

We’re seeking a hands-on Engineering Manager with strong technical depth to lead a small, high-velocity team building an AI-powered career services platform. This is a tech lead hybrid role - you’ll split time between people leadership and technical oversight, reviewing PRs, challenging architectural decisions, and ensuring engineering quality across a modern Rails + Next.js stack. You should be deeply fluent in AI-assisted development workflows and push the team to stay on the cutting edge of how AI transforms software engineering.

This is a remote position. We do not offer visa sponsorship or assistance. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.

Responsibilities:

This is a hybrid Tech Lead + People Manager role with real technical influence - not just process management. You will be leading a small team where your decisions directly shape the product and architecture. You will be joining a team embracing an AI-first culture - the team actively uses LLMs for development, and the product itself is AI-powered. You will be working on an early-stage product with room to define engineering culture, hiring bar, and technical direction, and on a modern tech stack: Rails 7.1 with YJIT, Next.js 15, Turbo monorepo, and well-structured domain boundaries.

• Lead and grow a small engineering team (2-3 engineers), running weekly demos, sprint planning, and 1:1s.
• Review pull requests with meaningful, actionable feedback — identify risks, anti-patterns, and improvement opportunities.
• Assess technical architecture proposals and flag risks around scalability, maintainability, and complexity.
• Own team delivery — scope work, break down epics, remove blockers, and ensure consistent shipping cadence.
• Drive AI-first engineering practices — champion AI coding tools, LLM-assisted workflows, and prompt engineering across the team.
• Collaborate with product and design on roadmap prioritization, balancing technical debt with feature velocity.
• Participate in architectural decisions across a modular Rails monolith and Next.js frontend monorepo.
• Hire, onboard, and develop Engineers as the team scales.
• Establish and maintain engineering standards, code review culture, and incident response practices.

Qualifications and Job Requirements:

• 15+ years of engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a tech lead or engineering management role.
• Strong code review skills — able to distinguish good from bad code and articulate why.
• Ability to evaluate technical architecture trade-offs in real-time during design discussions.
• Hands-on with backend systems (Ruby on Rails, Python, or similar) — you don’t need to commit daily, but you need to read, contribute code, and lead the team on production code.
• Active, demonstrated experience as an AI-first Tech Lead. Pushing the boundaries of development. Use of AI development tools (Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) in your own workflow.
• Genuine curiosity about LLMs and AI-assisted engineering — you follow developments and experiment.
• Strong communication skills — clear writing, direct feedback, effective facilitation.
• Experience managing small teams with high autonomy and low process overhead.
• Track record of shipping products in fast-paced, startup-like environments.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails and/or Next.js/TypeScript is a plus.
• Background in AI/ML product development or LLM API integrations is a plus.
• Experience with modular monolith or domain-driven design architectures is a plus.
• Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure knowledge (GCP preferred) is a plus.
• Familiarity with event-driven patterns, background job systems (Sidekiq), or async processing pipelines is a plus.
• Experience with subscription/SaaS business models and payment integrations is a plus.
• Observability tooling experience (DataDog, Sentry, Prometheus) is a plus.
• You must be a world-class individual contributor to thrive at Toptal. You will not be here just to tell other people what to do.