Engineering Manager

Benepass

23d•$200,000 - $230,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At Benepass, we are making benefits easy and believe people are the most important asset to any company. Traditional benefits packages no longer suffice in today's hybrid and remote-first environment. Benepass offers a fintech platform that allows companies to tailor benefits to their workforce's unique needs, enabling People teams to implement, administer, and track benefits that meet employees where they are. Employers design their benefits and perks by setting contribution amounts and eligible spend categories, recognizing that every employee has their own definition of wellness and requires different support to be productive and fulfilled. Our Mission is to help companies reimagine how they take care of their people. We are backed by leading investors and have raised approximately $75 million in equity capital. Benepass has been recognized on Inc. Magazine's Best Workplaces of 2023.

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience.
2+ years of experience leading teams of approximately 3-8 engineers (or equivalent scope).
Experience in a startup or SaaS environment is ideal.
Proven ability to lead design reviews.
Ability to enforce engineering standards.
Proficiency in prototyping in Python/Django (or a comparable backend stack).
Comfortable working on systems where correctness and reliability are paramount.
Experience mentoring engineers through 1:1s.
Experience setting growth goals against a leveling matrix.
Experience handling performance issues directly.
Experience in hiring.
Track record of shipping on commitments.
Ability to create clarity from ambiguity.
Experience running a healthy SDLC without excessive process.
You heavily use AI in your own work: coding, debugging, planning, writing, and operating a team.
You can describe your AI workflow in concrete terms.
You have used AI to increase your (and a team's) effectiveness, not just as a demo.
You review and own the output of AI-assisted work.

Nice To Haves

Experience in fintech, payments, card issuing, wallets, or benefits platforms.
Experience with ledgers, authorization/decisioning, or money movement.
Experience owning high-integrity backend systems (financial, eligibility, identity, or large-scale integrations) where small mistakes have significant customer or financial impact.
Experience splitting or scaling a team.
Proven ability to set and use team KPIs (reliability, cycle time, incident health, delivery against commitments).
Experience evaluating tools (CI/CD, observability) to increase leverage, not ceremony.
Strong background in performance management: promotion cases, PIPs, and hiring pipelines you would send a friend through.

Responsibilities

Lead a team of backend engineers on Core Services, which include critical systems like the ledger, decisioning, schedules, rules engine, HRIS integrations, authentication, and directory.
Report to the Vice President of Engineering and share ownership of Core Services with a peer Engineering Manager.
Own people, execution, and outcomes for your assigned slice of the team.
Ensure engineers stay anchored to Core Services for growth and accountability.
Facilitate shipping through time-boxed projects with Product, Design, and Frontend Engineering.
Maintain a hands-on approach, reviewing designs, spiking prototypes, and debugging when necessary, without aiming to be the best individual contributor.
Create the environment (clarity, staffing, culture) for individual contributors to own architecture and delivery.
Own team execution and outcomes, being accountable for results, not just activity.
Translate company priorities into a sequenced plan that the rest of the company can plan around.
Manage operational load, including production health, incidents, and correctness work for Core Services.
Prioritize incidents over the roadmap and escalate risks early.
Lead design reviews, championing simple, correct, and observable patterns.
Contribute to code, prototypes, or production debugging when it unblocks the team or validates a hard tradeoff.
Hold the line on critical invariants for money and eligibility: idempotency, auditability, reconciliation, and safe retries.
Partner with Client Apps, Platform, Customer Engineering, Product, and Ops to ensure Core Services is easy to build on and not a bottleneck.
Share context early, document decisions, and surface risks before they become problems.
Empower project teams to decide and drive, including gathering context, making tradeoffs, and unblocking themselves.
Heavily leverage AI in your own work across coding, debugging, design, planning, writing, analysis, 1:1 prep, hiring, and communication.
Coach the team in the craft of working effectively with AI, setting expectations, sharing best practices, and helping individuals catch up.
Evaluate new tools and technologies to increase effectiveness.
Ensure AI-assisted work meets the same standards of correctness, security, and craft as all other work.
Automate repetitive tasks and reduce toil.
Manage approximately 4-6 engineers initially, with the ability to hire more.
Run 1:1s focused on growth and set expectations against the IC leveling matrix.
Provide timely feedback, including constructive criticism.
Hire, onboard, and level the team, establishing a high hiring bar.
Coach project leads on kickoff, technical approach, updates, and release management.
Protect operational load, planning for it instead of assuming all time is for feature work.
Stay technically credible on critical-path systems.
Set and use team KPIs (reliability, cycle time, incident health, delivery against commitments).
Evaluate tools (CI/CD, observability) to increase leverage, not ceremony.
Manage performance, including promotion cases, PIPs, and hiring pipelines.