Engineering Manager

Loancrate•Los Angeles, CA

20d•$225,000 - $300,000•Remote

About The Position

Loancrate is a company focused on simplifying and reducing the cost of home-buying for lenders and borrowers by building AI-native tooling to automate mortgage workflows. The company aims for fully automated origination, which could save lenders significant operating expenses. Since its founding in 2020, Loancrate's remote team has facilitated over $85 billion in new home loans. The team values collaboration, open communication, and having fun while building. The ideal candidate enjoys diving deep quickly. This role is for an Engineering Manager who will be responsible for the health, output, and trajectory of an engineering pod of 6-8 engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering. The manager will own the pod's operating system, including people, execution, delivery health, cross-functional partnerships, and continuous improvement. They will collaborate with a Technical Lead on architecture and technical quality, and with a Product Manager on product direction. The role emphasizes accountability for the pod's health and delivery, especially given the high-stakes nature of the financial services product. A unique aspect of the role is the expectation of fluency with AI in engineering workflows, including background agents, evals, and AI-assisted development. The first day involves shipping to production as a team tradition, signifying the manager's connection to the engineers' work.

Requirements

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.

Responsibilities

Own your pod’s overall performance, and create clarity around priorities, ownership, and expectations.
Own the operating cadence including planning, retros, and follow-through. We’re looking for decision makers instead of status trackers.
Remove what blocks engineers from doing their best work, and keep them on high-leverage problems.
Hold high standards, accountability, autonomy, and psychological safety at the same time.
Be accountable for whether the pod delivers, and know the roadmap deeply enough to spot risk yourself.
Catch projects that are stalled, poorly scoped, or under-owned and intervene, including when an engineer is blocked or spinning.
Run weekly 1:1s with every direct report, and give specific feedback continuously rather than at review time.
Know each engineer's performance, strengths, motivation, and growth trajectory. This should be top of mind.
Set clear expectations, and give high performers room to increase their impact.
Address sustained performance gaps quickly with direct and honest feedback, coaching, and formal improvement plans when needed.
Support growth, write reviews that are fair and well-supported, and stay alert to burnout and retention risk.
Own onboarding for every new engineer including setting up real work before their day one, and a high-touch first month.
Get new hires into production quickly and onto meaningful work.
Keep documentation, runbooks, and ownership boundaries accurate enough that engineers ramp fast.
Partner closely with your pod's Product Manager, and make sure effort lands on genuinely high-value problems.
Challenge unclear, incomplete, or unnecessarily complex requirements.
Participate in planning and prioritization rather than receiving work from Product.
Represent engineering tradeoffs including urgency, cost, quality, and scope to non-engineering stakeholders, and escalate persistent misalignment.
Partner with your Technical Lead on architecture, quality, and technical risk and protect their capacity to actually lead technically.
Maintain enough technical depth to challenge plans and recognize problems on your own. You don't need to be the strongest engineer on the pod, but you do need to be credible to it.
Ensure technical decisions have clear owners, get made at the right level, and don't stall on unresolved disagreement.
Keep technical debt and quality risk visible and deliberately managed rather than silently absorbed.
Contribute as an IC where it doesn't crowd out the rest of the job, and keep operational burden sustainable so incidents produce durable improvements. On-call is shared team-wide.
Know whether your pod has the right skills and seniority mix, and recommend hiring based on real organizational problems.
Interview meaningfully, vet every candidate entering the final round, and help close strong candidates.
Identify capability and leadership gaps, recommend transfers where an engineer would have more impact, and support succession planning.
Give the Head of Engineering an honest picture of pod health, and surface risks and delivery issues early.
Escalate when a problem needs organizational help, not simply because it's hard, with context, options, and a recommendation.
Communicate dependencies and tradeoffs across pods before they become surprises.