Manager, Engineering

LINQ•Austin, TX

17h•Hybrid

About The Position

As an Engineering Manager for School Nutrition, you will lead the engineering team(s) building the platform that processes over 1 billion meal transactions annually across thousands of school districts. You'll partner closely with engineering leadership and product teams to ship mission-critical software — the kind that has to work during the lunch rush, every school day, in cafeterias nationwide. This is a player/coach role that leans firmly toward coach. Roughly 80% of your time is spent leading people — hiring, coaching, unblocking, raising the bar, and driving delivery — and the remaining time is spent where a manager's technical leverage is highest: architecture and design reviews, high-stakes code review, pairing on hard problems, and jumping into the code when production needs you. You're not here to pick up sprint tickets, but you are close enough to the code that your engineers trust your technical instincts and you can carry real weight during an incident.

Requirements

3+ years managing software engineering teams, with a track record of shipping production software at quality
Experience managing mixed FTE and contractor teams - with a clear sense of where those management approaches converge and diverge
Strong technical background with substantial .NET / C# experience; you've shipped real systems and are sharp enough to contribute credibly in design and code reviews
Comfort across Angular and SQL Server (or close-adjacent stacks you can ramp on quickly)
Experience leading modernization work - evolving legacy systems incrementally without stopping the world
Evidence-based management approach - familiar with DORA, SPACE, or equivalent frameworks, and honest about their limits
Production experience working in AWS environments; comfortable reasoning about Lambda, RDS, and common cloud-native services
Appreciation for the tradeoffs between legacy and cloud-native approaches, and experience guiding teams through the transition
Hands-on user of Claude Code, Cursor, or similar AI-assisted coding environments
Able to coach a team on effective, responsible use of AI tooling — and honest about where it works and where it doesn't
Coaching-first instinct - you default to asking before telling, and help people think clearly rather than thinking for them
Direct communicator - you can challenge respectfully, escalate clearly, and write a crisp exec update
Fluent in Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD practices

Nice To Haves

Experience in school nutrition, food service, point-of-sale systems, or K-12 EdTech
Background managing teams that support high-transaction-volume, mission-critical systems (POS, payments, or similar)
Experience running blended onshore/offshore or FTE/contractor engineering teams at scale
Experience splitting or merging teams as organizational scope evolves
Hands-on experience with .NET Core, AWS Lambda, and PostgreSQL (our direction of travel)
Experience with offline-first or intermittent-connectivity patterns
Contributions to engineering excellence programs, management communities of practice, or internal leadership development

Responsibilities

Lead and grow a team of engineers across a blended FTE/contractor model - running meaningful 1:1s, writing growth plans, managing performance honestly, and giving direct, kind, actionable feedback
Own delivery outcomes for the School Nutrition platform - partnering with Product to shape the work, not just receive it, and driving predictable, high-quality execution
Partner with the Sr. Director of Engineering and your senior engineers to shape and execute the modernization roadmap - evolving the platform toward .NET Core, cloud-native services, and PostgreSQL without destabilizing daily delivery
Raise the hiring bar and own the hiring loop for your team - sourcing, interview calibration, and closing talent
Contribute as a technical leader in ADRs, design reviews, and high-stakes code reviews; weigh in on tradeoffs with enough depth that your technical voice genuinely sharpens the work
Drive healthy engineering practices - testing discipline, CI/CD, DORA/flow metrics, and incident response - using evidence to guide improvement rather than opinion alone
Enable the team to adopt AI-assisted development tooling (Claude Code) effectively and responsibly, modeling the practices yourself
Cultivate a culture where engineers are confident to change code - when people are afraid to touch something, we move slowly and we break things
Communicate up, across, and down clearly in writing - roadmaps, status, risks, tradeoffs, and decisions

Benefits

Flex Your Workspace: Work remote from one of our eligible states across the US, or if you’re near Austin three days in office a week!
Planning Your Future: Our 401(k) plan comes with a 4% employer match on total earnings (not just your base salary).
Performance Pays Off: Whether it’s a company bonus or target sales commission, your hard work doesn’t go unnoticed.
Vacation Your Way: Our flexible Open Paid Time Off Plan lets you take the time you need, when you need it.
Paid Parental Leave: Take the time you need to welcome your new addition – We’ve got you covered!
Ten Paid Corporate Holidays: Enjoy a little extra downtime to relax and recharge with the ten paid holidays each year.
Giving Back: Feel good while doing good – 16 paid volunteer hours to support the causes that matter most to you. #LINQCares
Benefits That Have Your Back (And Teeth, Too!): Rock-solid medical, dental and vision coverage. Pick your vibe: a low deductible PPO and pair with an FSA or a HDHP with a sweet HSA – with contributions from LINQ. Dental perks that even cover braces for the kiddos.
Wellness Perks: Employer-paid Short-Term Disability, Long Term Disability, Basic Life, and AD&D insurance. Gym reimbursements and tons of extra savings on travel assistance, employee assistance, and even pet insurance options.
Rewards For Referrals: Got an amazing candidate in your network? Send them our way and earn a referral bonus when they join the team!