Loancrate, United States
Since starting in 2020, our remote team has enabled our customers to power >$85 billion in new home loans. We are a group of people excited to tackle the complexity of the home-lending industry. We care about collaboration, very open communication covering the good & the bad so that we learn from our decisions quickly, and ultimately having fun while we're building. You'll fit in well if you like diving deep quickly!
Our dreams are big and we have much to build! We're looking for an Engineering Manager to own the health, output, and trajectory of one of our engineering pods — roughly 6–8 engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering. You'll own your pod’s operating system: people, execution, delivery health, cross-functional partnership, and continuous improvement. You'll partner with a Technical Lead on architecture and technical quality, and with a Product Manager on what's worth building.
Those partnerships are the job. You are not the technical decision-maker of last resort, and you are not a proxy PM — you are the person accountable for whether the pod is healthy and whether the pod delivers. Our product runs some of the most complex, high-stakes workflows in financial services, and when our software is wrong, someone's home purchase is at risk. That reality shapes how we build and how we manage.
(It's okay not to have all of these — these are just some things we're excited about!)
👥 Experience managing engineers directly — ideally 5+ on a product or platform team, with real examples of performance you improved and performance you had to manage out.
🛠 A credible engineering background. You've shipped production software yourself and can still read a PR, evaluate a design doc, and push back on an estimate.
🚚 A track record of delivery. You can point to teams that got predictably better at shipping under your management, and explain what you actually changed.
🤖 Fluency with modern AI product development — evals, experiment design, dataset curation, and the reality that non-deterministic systems need different management than deterministic ones. Plus first-hand use of AI in your own engineering workflow.
🧭 Comfort with ambiguity and high-complexity domains. Mortgage origination is genuinely hard. You'll need to build real domain understanding, not manage around it.
🤝 Strong product partnership instincts. You engage with the "why," challenge weak requirements, and hold your own with non-engineering stakeholders.
✍️ Crisp written communication. We're remote-first and write things down. Your reviews, escalations, and updates need to be clear and specific.
🔥 Directness with care. You give hard feedback early and kindly, and you'd rather have an uncomfortable conversation now than an unfair surprise later.
📊 Operational and reliability instincts — SLOs, incident response, postmortems, and keeping toil off your team's plate.
🔒 A keen eye for security risk. We store and display some of people's most sensitive personal data and need to keep it safe.
🌱 Experience hiring and onboarding in a growing organization, including interviewing well and closing candidates.
On your first day, you'll ship something to production. It's a team tradition, and for managers it's also a statement of intent. We don't want EMs who lose touch with what their engineers actually do all day.
A quick note before diving in: we're building an AI-native product, and we rely on AI heavily in our own engineering workflows too. We use background agents, evals, and AI-assisted development. We expect our managers to be fluent in this, not just tolerant of it. If that excites you, you'll thrive here. If it gives you pause, this probably isn't the right fit.
From there, your first 90 days will look something like:
First 30 days Weekly 1:1s established with every direct report, and a real read on each person's strengths, motivation, and growth trajectory. A working understanding of the pod's roadmap, codebase, and dependencies. A clear-eyed inventory of what's actually blocking your engineers.
First 60 days Your pod’s operating cadence is yours: planning, retros, and follow-through. You're catching stalled or poorly scoped projects before they slip, and you're surfacing risk to the Head of Engineering before it's discovered independently. Your PM has started treating you as a partner in prioritization rather than a recipient of it.
First 90 days Performance expectations are explicit and understood. Any sustained performance gap on the pod is being actively addressed. New hires are ramping faster than they were before you arrived. The pod is solving most of its own problems without escalation.
Nearly all of our code is TypeScript. React + Vite on the frontend, Node/Express on the backend (in Docker), GraphQL/Apollo on both sides, Postgres (Aurora) as our database — all in a Turborepo/PNPM monorepo with types generated from our Postgres and GraphQL schemas and shared end to end. Infrastructure runs on AWS (ECS, Aurora, ElastiCache, MSK/Kafka, OpenSearch) and is managed 100% as code with Terraform and Pulumi. CI/CD runs on Buildkite with TypeScript pipeline-as-code, including per-PR ephemeral environments. Observability is Datadog, CloudWatch, and Sentry.
You won't be writing most of this code. You will be expected to understand it well enough to know when a plan doesn't add up.
WHAT IS LOANCRATE?
We started Loancrate to make home-buying simpler and less expensive for lenders and borrowers (us!). Today, mortgage lenders are stuck running their companies on software products built 20 years ago. These products are slow, unstable, and don't lead to material improvements in efficiency. When using these systems, the average human cost to originate a loan is still over $11,000.
Loancrate builds AI-native tooling to automate mortgage workflows. Our ultimate goal is fully automated origination, which has the potential to save lenders over $16B in operating expense per year.
Loancrate is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.
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Source: the Loancrate Ashby job board. We last checked this job 2 h ago. We first saw it 5 days ago. A job on a job board does not always mean that the team interviews people now. We found this job board in a public list. We did not yet compare it with the careers page of the company.
This base pay is above the median for software engineering jobs that are remote in the US with no level in the job title.
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