Engineering Manager

📋 Description

• • As an Engineering Manager at Clutch Technologies, Inc., you will be at the forefront of leading a dedicated product engineering team, typically comprising 5 to 6 talented engineers. Your overarching responsibility will be to guide the team through the entire product lifecycle, from the initial spark of an idea, through meticulous development and rigorous testing, to a successful launch, and finally, ensuring its ongoing reliability and performance in production. You will be instrumental in maintaining and elevating the high standards Clutch sets for quality, development speed, and tangible customer impact.
• • This is a hands-on leadership role. Your journey will begin with an immersive dive into the product and codebase. You will actively contribute by shipping small features, gaining a deep understanding of our systems and processes. This foundational experience will seamlessly transition you into full-time team leadership, equipped with practical knowledge and credibility.
• • A significant focus of your role will be on cultivating and reinforcing durable systems and robust engineering habits. This includes establishing clear ownership structures, defining and enforcing clean interfaces between system components, championing unwavering quality in all deliverables, and driving steady, incremental improvements in how the team plans, builds, tests, deploys, and operates software.
• • You will be joining our Account Opening team, a critical function within Clutch. This team is responsible for building and refining end-to-end account opening experiences. The goal is to empower Clutch’s clients, primarily Credit Unions, to onboard their own customers smoothly, efficiently, and with the utmost safety and compliance.
• • At Clutch, Engineering Managers maintain a close connection to the technical work. You will frequently pair with engineers on complex problems, conduct thorough code reviews to ensure quality and best practices, actively unblock delivery by removing impediments, and provide hands-on guidance to help the team build and maintain strong engineering habits.
• • We are at the exciting forefront of adopting AI tools across our software development lifecycle. This includes leveraging AI in planning, building, testing, code review, and operational monitoring. We are seeking a leader who can not only embrace this vision but actively contribute to its practical implementation, helping the team harness AI to enhance productivity and innovation.
• • Within your first 3 months, you will immerse yourself in understanding the product landscape. This involves deeply learning the client needs, the intricacies of the account opening flows, the key success metrics we track, and identifying areas where we experience pain points in delivery and reliability.
• • You will also ship a set of small, well-scoped features or improvements. This practical contribution will help you build context, gain trust with the team, and understand our end-to-end development and release processes.
• • A key objective will be to map the current Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). You will analyze how work progresses from an initial idea through code review, to release, and finally to ongoing support. You will identify the top 3 bottlenecks in this process and begin implementing solutions to address them.
• • Furthermore, you will propose and initiate the rollout of at least one AI-assisted workflow improvement. This could span areas such as AI-enhanced code review, automated test generation, intelligent release note drafting, streamlined incident follow-up processes, or improved support ticket triage. Crucially, this initiative will have a clearly defined success measure to track its impact.
• • By the 6-month mark, you will be adept at running the team’s planning and execution rhythm. This means establishing clear goals, ensuring predictable delivery timelines, and minimizing unexpected disruptions. You will focus on improving estimation accuracy and work sizing to ensure that our plans realistically align with our execution capabilities.
• • You will expand the adoption of AI from experimental tools to integral workflows. This involves creating or tailoring internal AI helpers, rigorously measuring their impact on productivity and quality, and documenting best practices for their use across the team.
• • A core part of your role will be coaching and developing engineers. You will provide frequent, constructive feedback, set clear performance expectations, and offer practical support to help them navigate their day-to-day work and career growth.
• • Within 9 months, you will take full ownership of the outcomes for your team’s area of responsibility. This encompasses delivery performance, system reliability, and the direct product results that are attributable to your team’s efforts.
• • You will focus on building a durable and scalable team system. This includes refining onboarding processes, improving documentation standards, establishing clear coding and architectural standards, and creating repeatable, efficient ways of working that can scale as the team expands.
• • You will lead the delivery of at least one larger project from inception to completion. This will involve breaking down complex initiatives into manageable milestones, skillfully navigating tradeoffs, and ensuring consistent alignment with stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle.
• • Finally, you will embed continuous improvement as a core team habit. This means fostering a steady pipeline of code cleanups, strategic technical debt reduction, and essential tooling upgrades that collectively reduce friction and enhance efficiency over time.