Talent Network: Engineering Manager

<p> </p><h3 id="job-summary">Job Summary:</h3> <p>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.</p> <p>This is a remote position. We do not offer visa sponsorship or assistance. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.</p> <h3 id="responsibilities">Responsibilities:</h3> <p>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.</p> <ul style="list-style-type: disc;"> <li>Lead and grow a small engineering team (2-3 engineers), running weekly demos, sprint planning, and 1:1s.</li> <li>Review pull requests with meaningful, actionable feedback — identify risks, anti-patterns, and improvement opportunities.</li> <li>Assess technical architecture proposals and flag risks around scalability, maintainability, and complexity.</li> <li>Own team delivery — scope work, break down epics, remove blockers, and ensure consistent shipping cadence.</li> <li>Drive AI-first engineering practices — champion AI coding tools, LLM-assisted workflows, and prompt engineering across the team.</li> <li>Collaborate with product and design on roadmap prioritization, balancing technical debt with feature velocity.</li> <li>Participate in architectural decisions across a modular Rails monolith and Next.js frontend monorepo.</li> <li>Hire, onboard, and develop Engineers as the team scales.</li> <li>Establish and maintain engineering standards, code review culture, and incident response practices.</li> </ul> <h3 id="qualifications-and-job-requirements">Qualifications and Job Requirements:</h3> <ul style="list-style-type: disc;"> <li>15+ years of engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a tech lead or engineering management role.</li> <li>Strong code review skills — able to distinguish good from bad code and articulate why.</li> <li>Ability to evaluate technical architecture trade-offs in real-time during design discussions.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Genuine curiosity about LLMs and AI-assisted engineering — you follow developments and experiment.</li> <li>Strong communication skills — clear writing, direct feedback, effective facilitation.</li> <li>Experience managing small teams with high autonomy and low process overhead.</li> <li>Track record of shipping products in fast-paced, startup-like environments.</li> <li>Experience with Ruby on Rails and/or Next.js/TypeScript is a plus.</li> <li>Background in AI/ML product development or LLM API integrations is a plus.</li> <li>Experience with modular monolith or domain-driven design architectures is a plus.</li> <li>Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure knowledge (GCP preferred) is a plus.</li> <li>Familiarity with event-driven patterns, background job systems (Sidekiq), or async processing pipelines is a plus.</li> <li>Experience with subscription/SaaS business models and payment integrations is a plus.</li> <li>Observability tooling experience (DataDog, Sentry, Prometheus) is a plus.</li> <li>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.</li> </ul> <p></p> <p></p><p><br></p><p></p>