Senior Manager, Engineering, Lister

Apartment List•Remote within the US,

6d•$172,000 - $245,000

About The Position

As Senior Manager, Engineering for the Lister team, you'll lead the engineering behind how property partners get their listings onto Apartment List and get value back out. Through Lister, we turn partner data from across the property management landscape into accurate listings, and turn renter interest into revenue for our partners. Reporting into the Head of Engineering, you'll play a pivotal role in executing product strategy for the Lister domain, setting the engineering vision, roadmap, and delivery across three pods, each supported by a team lead who owns day-to-day execution. Our ideal leader is both a strong operator and a strategic one: a player-coach who brings deep expertise in backend services and data pipelines that partners depend on, and knows how to apply AI to move faster. You stay close enough to the code to keep the technical bar high while growing the engineers and championing the partners the team serves. You'll thrive here if you're comfortable where the inputs come from external systems you don't control and no two behave alike. You embrace that messy reality, build clarity where there was none, and lead with steadiness through ambiguity and change.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing engineering teams of 5 or more.
Experience managing through team leads or senior engineers, not just direct ICs.
A track record of building and scaling backend services and data pipelines that other teams and external partners depend on.
Comfort with messy third-party integrations. You have owned a system whose inputs you did not control, and you know how to build guardrails, observability, and reconciliation around data you cannot trust.
Strong technical judgment. You can hold the architecture bar for a team you do not out-code, and you know when to dive in yourself.
Experience partnering directly with Product Managers, Designers, and Analysts to shape roadmaps, not just receive them.
A record of growing engineers, including promoting people and turning around underperformance.
Clear written communication. You can explain a data pipeline failure to a partner-facing stakeholder and a business trade-off to an executive.
Experience with Kotlin, Ruby, and Typescript, or the willingness to learn them.
Experience building cloud-native applications, preferably on Google Cloud Platform.

Nice To Haves

knows how to apply AI to move faster.

Responsibilities

Own the outcomes of the Lister domain end to end: delivery, technical health, partner data quality, and the health of the team that carries it.
Set and defend a committed quarterly roadmap across three pods, including an explicit list of what the team is not doing and why.
Develop the team's leads. Grow their scope from project leadership toward broader ownership, and coach the engineers under them.
Hire, mentor, and retain a high-performing team across levels, and address underperformance directly when it appears.
Stay hands-on. Review code, drive architecture decisions on the pipeline and partner integrations, and pick up work when the situation calls for it.
Partner with Product, Design, Analytics, Partner Success, and Finance to translate ambiguous partner and regulatory pressure into scoped engineering work.
Own the intake process for the domain. Classify incoming partner escalations, data quality reports, and feature asks, and push back when the answer is no.
Be accountable for the reliability of the systems the team owns, including on-call health, incident response, and the operational completeness of new services.
Represent Lister engineering to leadership: what shipped, what is at risk, what it will take.