Engineering Manager - Home Team

Coursera

1d

About The Position

The Home Team is at the heart of our logged-in experience, directly influencing retention, engagement, and long term success by guiding learners through discovery and engagement. We tailor experiences based on learner needs—whether they are exploring our catalog for the first time, working toward their first professional certificate, or developing a new skill.
The team focuses on several key areas:
Unified Consumer and Enterprise Home: Serve as the launching pad for discovering, enrolling and learning in Coursera content seamlessly across both our consumer and enterprise products. Interface cleanly with a number of cross-functional teams.
Personalization: Leveraging key attributes from our learners, personalize the logged-in experience based on the phase of the learner journey. Work closely with related discovery and machine learning teams to better understand and serve the learner.
Goal Progression and Advancement: Focus the learner on the particular actions that will progress them towards their long term learning goal, whether that be advancing in a new skill, getting an industry certificate or just learning for fun.
Unified Application Architecture: Establish and govern an unified application architecture which enables the broader engineering organization to build out features across multiple business lines within a single implementation.
As the Engineering Manager for the Home team, you will lead a full-stack engineering team responsible for creating these critical capabilities. Your role involves technical leadership, architectural guidance, close collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders, and driving strategic initiatives to deliver scalable, innovative solutions for millions of active learners aligned with Coursera’s broader strategic goals. You will foster a high-performance team culture, encourage innovation, and ensure operational excellence, directly contributing to Coursera's mission of delivering impactful, high-quality learning experiences worldwide.

Requirements

• Education & Experience: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, OR equivalent practical experience (e.g. 3+ years as a hands-on software engineer building web applications or distributed systems).
• Industry Experience: 5+ years in software product development or a related field, including prior experience leading engineering teams (2+ years in an engineering management role). You should have a proven track record of delivering software projects and managing cross-functional development teams.
• Technical Background: Strong software engineering foundation with experience in system design, data structures, and algorithms. (You should have professional coding/development experience in your background, even if this role is not an IC position.)

Nice To Haves

• Leadership: Demonstrated integrity, transparency, and inspiration in your leadership style. Ability to empower and motivate a team to achieve ambitious goals.
• Emotional Intelligence: High degree of empathy, humility, and effective communication skills. Experience building inclusive team cultures and handling interpersonal dynamics with patience and tact.
• Problem Solving: Creative and analytical mindset with rigorous technical problem-solving skills. Ability to navigate complexity and guide the team to well-reasoned, innovative solutions.
• Thriving in Ambiguity: Excellence in driving clarity and results in ambiguous, complex situations. Boldness and grit to chart a path forward even when the way is not fully defined.
• Product & Platform Vision: Experience balancing rapid product feature delivery with long-term platform health. Proven ability to manage technical debt and invest in platform infrastructure that yields high leverage across multiple products or use cases.
• Platform Ownership: Experience managing a team that owns a product platform or critical infrastructure component. Ideally, you have firsthand experience defining the team’s charter and boundaries of ownership, especially in the context of evolving a new platform.
• Experience with Generative AI applications including prompt engineering and using APIs such as OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini.
• Scalable Systems Expertise: Demonstrated experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, using modern backend technologies such as Java or Scala and API frameworks like GraphQL and gRPC. You understand how to design systems for high availability, performance, and maintainability at scale.
• Full-Stack Familiarity: Familiarity with modern frontend technologies (React, TypeScript, or similar) and how front-end interfaces integrate with backend services. While depth in one area (backend or frontend) is expected, the ability to understand and guide end-to-end system architecture is highly valued.
• Inspirational Leadership: You are an inspiring and transparent leader who empowers and motivates your team to achieve ambitious goals.
• High Emotional Intelligence: Possess a high degree of empathy, humility, and strong communication skills. You excel at building inclusive team cultures and adeptly manage interpersonal dynamics.
• Rigorous Problem Solving: Demonstrate a creative and analytical mindset with strong technical problem-solving abilities. You can navigate complexity and guide your team to innovative, well-reasoned solutions.
• Thriving in Ambiguity: You excel at driving clarity and results in ambiguous and complex situations, possessing the boldness and grit to forge a path forward even when details are undefined.
• Experienced in balancing rapid product feature delivery with long-term platform health. You have a proven ability to manage technical debt and strategically invest in platform infrastructure for high leverage.
• Platform Ownership Expertise: Experience leading a team that owns a product platform or critical infrastructure. Ideally, you have firsthand experience defining team charters and ownership boundaries, especially during new platform evolution.
• Generative AI Applications: Proficient with Generative AI applications, including prompt engineering and using APIs such as OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini.
• Scalable Systems Expertise: Demonstrated experience in building and operating large-scale distributed systems using modern backend technologies like Java or Scala, and API frameworks like GraphQL and gRPC. You understand how to design systems for high availability, performance, and maintainability at scale.
• Full-Stack Familiarity: Familiar with modern frontend technologies (React, TypeScript, or similar) and their integration with backend services. While depth in one area (backend or frontend) is expected, the ability to understand and guide end-to-end system architecture is highly valued.

Responsibilities

• Building the Team: Partner with cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Design, Data, Content Operations) to refine the team’s charter, ensure alignment with broader business goals, and support overall team health and growth.
• Mentoring: Act as a role model and coach for engineers. Conduct regular career development conversations, provide constructive feedback, and inspire engineers to achieve their best.
• Hiring: Identify key skill gaps and growth areas on the team. Drive the hiring pipeline by sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding talented engineers to build a well-rounded, high-performing team.
• Advising (Technical Leadership): Provide hands-on technical guidance to engineers as they design systems and tackle complex problems. Encourage sound architectural decisions and help team members grow into technical leaders in their product work.
• Product Enablement: In partnership with Product Management, curate a compelling vision for the logged-in home experience. Translate high-level product needs into an actionable engineering roadmap. Prioritize and drive key initiatives forward, run sprint planning and stand-ups, and ensure the team delivers product features that delight content creators and learners.
• Platform Leadership: Balance building new features with managing tech debt to maintain a reliable, scalable platform. Evolve the platform for high leverage – architect systems and services that can accelerate multiple product initiatives across Coursera. Ensure consistency and quality in the user experience by creating reusable components and frameworks for content.
• Mediating: Foster an inclusive, collaborative team environment. Proactively address interpersonal issues and facilitate crucial conversations with empathy and fairness. Ensure every team member feels empowered, engaged, and comfortable sharing ideas and concerns.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 11-50 employees