Engineering Manager

📋 Description

• • As an Engineering Manager at Hauler Hero, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our waste management SaaS platform, blending hands-on technical contribution with strategic leadership. This is a unique opportunity to lead while remaining deeply engaged with the code, spending approximately half your time on technical execution and the other half on team development, mentorship, and cross-functional collaboration. You will inherit a well-functioning engineering organization and be tasked with elevating our technical standards, nurturing senior engineering talent, evolving our architecture for scalability, and ensuring the reliability of both our platform and our growing team.
• • You will partner closely with the Head of Engineering and principal engineers to define and drive our technical direction, while simultaneously cultivating leadership capabilities within the team. Hauler Hero is at the forefront of AI-assisted development, embracing AI tools like Claude (Opus 4.5), Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot as fundamental transformers of software engineering. Our philosophy centers on engineering leadership evolving from direct code management to orchestrating teams that leverage AI agents for implementation, allowing human focus to remain on architecture, design, and critical decision-making that requires human judgment.
• • In this role, AI will be a significant part of your personal technical work (approximately 35% of your time). You will extensively use AI tools for hands-on coding, focusing on backend services, PostgreSQL queries, and system integrations, while directing the AI's efforts towards architecture and performance optimization. You will serve as a model for effective AI usage, demonstrating to your team how to leverage these tools efficiently.
• • Your technical leadership (approximately 30% of your time) will involve mentoring engineers on the effective use of AI tools in code reviews and pairing sessions. You will establish clear standards for AI-assisted development, defining what aspects are best automated and what requires human discernment. You will guide the team on prompt engineering techniques and how to articulate technical problems precisely to AI systems. Furthermore, you will help engineers develop critical thinking skills to rigorously validate AI-generated solutions and champion best practices for a 'trust but verify' approach.
• • Team development (approximately 35% of your time) will focus on coaching engineers through the transition to AI-assisted workflows. You will identify individuals who are adept at using AI tools and those who require additional support, fostering a culture where AI is perceived as a powerful force multiplier, not a threat. You will help the team understand that AI proficiency is rapidly becoming a core engineering skill, essential for future success.
• • Your leadership responsibilities will encompass system architecture and technical strategy decisions, defining code review standards and quality expectations, managing team hiring and development, and overseeing performance management. You will also drive cross-functional coordination and roadmap planning.
• • AI will assist you in the implementation of complex features you own, generating tests and documentation, suggesting query optimizations, and aiding in analyzing logs and debugging support. You will be responsible for reviewing all AI-generated output, both for your own work and that of your team, ensuring correctness, quality, and architectural soundness through your expert judgment.
• • By enabling your team to use AI tools effectively, you will contribute to dramatically increased output, allowing them to ship more features, solve problems faster, and dedicate more time to design and architecture while maintaining or improving quality standards. This accelerated team velocity is a key outcome of our AI-first approach.
• • We are seeking leaders with deep technical understanding of backend systems to validate AI-generated code, proficiency in reviewing PostgreSQL queries for performance and correctness, and the ability to identify architectural issues and edge cases in AI-assisted development. Crucially, you must possess a genuine excitement for mentoring your team through this technological shift, the skill to set clear standards for AI usage, and a talent for developing engineers' critical thinking regarding AI-generated solutions.
• • A growth mindset is essential, embracing continuous learning in new software development and team leadership methodologies. We are looking for individuals who are curious, experimental, strong technical mentors, quality-focused, and growth-minded. We are not seeking leaders resistant to AI, those who view AI as a replacement for engineers, managers unable to balance hands-on AI usage with leadership, or those who cannot articulate and teach effective problem-solving processes.
• • This role is critical because the industry is rapidly shifting. Engineering leaders who embrace AI-assisted development and can guide their teams through this transition will be highly valuable. Hauler Hero provides the necessary training, tools, and support to keep our team ahead of this curve. If you are excited about leading a team through this transformation and empowering engineers to work effectively with AI, you will thrive here. If you are skeptical about AI's role in daily workflows and team practices, this position may not be the ideal fit.
• • Your day-to-day will involve writing production code for complex backend services, migrations, and integrations; designing and scaling backend services with a focus on PostgreSQL performance; driving architectural decisions across microservices on GCP; leading technical design reviews and setting engineering standards; identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks; and owning critical technical initiatives end-to-end.
• • You will also mentor engineers at all levels through reviews and pairing, raise engineering practices in code quality, testing, documentation, and incident response, lead architectural decision-making across domains, and develop senior engineers into technical leaders. Coordinating cross-team technical initiatives will also be a key part of your role.
• • As a manager, you will have led technical teams in growing organizations, made impactful architectural and organizational decisions, remained hands-on with production code, developed senior engineers into leaders, and balanced speed with quality. Engineers should seek your technical and career guidance, and you should lead through influence and technical credibility.