Engineering Manager

Portland Seed Fund; United States; Remote; USD 185,000 - 215,000; Full time

Job summary

Customer.io is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead high-performing teams delivering customer-focused value. You will own end-to-end projects, set milestones, and ensure scalable architectures while driving AI-native development practices.

You will mentor engineers, hire top talent, and coordinate across departments to align with customer success. Ideal candidates bring 3+ years of SaaS leadership, a track record of delivering with milestones, strong technical chops, and a bias for action in

Qualifications

• 3+ years managing engineers at a SaaS company (B2B or B2C), ideally early-to-mid-stage.
• A track record of driving execution- concrete delivery outcomes with milestones, dates, and 'I drove' ownership.
• A strong technical background—you can hold your own in architecture conversations and design reviews.
• Comfort operating with high autonomy and little prescribed structure—you create your own clarity.
• Demonstrated AI-native leadership—not just personal fluency, but bringing AI-first practices into how your team builds.
• Experience building high-performing, inclusive, and collaborative teams.
• Clear, concise, and direct communication, both verbal and written.

Responsibilities

• Care deeply about our customers and their outcomes.
• Lead your squad to deliver real customer value by owning projects end to end—from planning through delivery, quality, and follow-through.
• Drive execution: set milestones, keep work moving through ambiguity and competing priorities, and ship in small, observable increments.
• Make confident decisions when the path isn't obvious, and lead your team through them.
• Set the operating rhythm that helps your team move fastest, rather than defaulting to ceremony for its own sake.
• Ensure your squad's solutions are scalable, architecturally sound, flexible, and secure, with strong peer-review, QA, documentation, deployment, logging, and monitoring practices.
• Stay close to the work- jump into design reviews, architecture calls, and incidents rather than watching from a distance.
• Provide direct, timely, and specific coaching, and create meaningful development opportunities for your direct reports.
• Hire, onboard, and manage performance so the right people are in place to hit your squad's goals.
• Bring an AI-native perspective- use AI tools to accelerate the team's velocity and help everyone prototype faster and ship smarter.
• Partner across engineering and other departments to align efforts with customer success, and reach higher when our customers are having a bad day.

Job description

Hi, I'm Paul, VP of Engineering at Customer.io . We're always looking for thoughtful, driven Engineering Managers to add to our org. Some of our teams are building customer-facing product and workflows; others keep our distributed systems reliable, observable, and ready to scale. Whichever kind of problem energizes you, if you lead people well, hold a high technical bar, and drive work to completion without waiting to be handed a plan, we want to hear from you.

Over 9,000 companies- from scrappy startups to global brands -use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. Customer.io powers automated communication that people actually want to receive.

We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data-what people do or don't do inside a web or mobile app. Under the hood: Go, React, and AI help us ship fast and scale with confidence.

What we value

Ownership. You set direction and see initiatives through. You create clarity when things are murky and set the path forward rather than waiting for one to be defined, and you're motivated by impact—not just intention. You hold yourself and your team accountable to shipping, not just staying busy.

Leaders who can do both. You operate at the strategic level and stay close to the technical work. You can align stakeholders on a plan and earn your engineers' respect in the same day—you don't choose between vision and execution, you hold both.

A drive to execute through resistance. Competing priorities, skeptical stakeholders, tired teams—you've moved work forward anyway. You name the resistance, make the call, and own the milestones and the misses.

An AI-first mindset. AI is central to how you build and how you lead your team to build. You have a real, concrete point of view on AI-native development, you use agentic tooling yourself, and you bring it into how your squad operates.

A healthy skepticism for "the way things are done." You bring rigor and pragmatism. Best practices matter- but never more than forward motion. You know when to build, when to buy, and when to wait—and you're comfortable making the call with incomplete information, then adjusting as you learn.

What you'll do

• Care deeply about our customers and their outcomes
• Lead your squad to deliver real customer value by owning projects end to end- from planning through delivery, quality, and follow-through
• Drive execution: set milestones, keep work moving through ambiguity and competing priorities, and ship in small, observable increments rather than waiting for a release window
• Make confident decisions when the path isn't obvious, and lead your team through them
• Set the operating rhythm that helps your team move fastest, rather than defaulting to ceremony for its own sake
• Ensure your squad's solutions are scalable, architecturally sound, flexible, and secure, with strong peer-review, QA, documentation, deployment, logging, and monitoring practices
• Stay close to the work- jump into design reviews, architecture calls, and incidents rather than watching from a distance
• Provide direct, timely, and specific coaching, and create meaningful development opportunities for your direct reports
• Hire, onboard, and manage performance so the right people are in place to hit your squad's goals
• Bring an AI-native perspective- use AI tools to accelerate the team's velocity and help everyone prototype faster and ship smarter
• Partner across engineering and other departments to align efforts with customer success, and reach higher when our customers are having a bad day

What we're looking for

• 3+ years managing engineers at a SaaS company (B2B or B2C), ideally early-to-mid-stage
• A track record of driving execution- concrete delivery outcomes with milestones, dates, and "I drove" ownership, especially in complex or fast-moving environments
• A strong technical background—you can hold your own in architecture conversations and design reviews, represent your squad's technical choices across the company, and you've shipped real work recently enough to stay credible
• Comfort operating with high autonomy and little prescribed structure—you create your own clarity and make difficult tradeoffs between competing priorities
• Demonstrated AI-native leadership—not just personal fluency, but bringing AI-first practices into how your team builds
• Experience building high-performing, inclusive, and collaborative teams
• Clear, concise, and direct communication, both verbal and written

We believe in transparency. Starting salary for this role is $185,000-$215,000 USD (or equivalent in local currency) depending on experience and subject to market rate adjustment.

We know our people are what make us great, and we're committed to taking great care of them. Our inclusive benefits package supports your well-being and growth, including 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums for you and your family. We also offer 16 weeks paid parental leave, unlimited PTO, stipends for remote work and wellness, a professional development budget, and more.

No gotchas, no trick questions - just a clear, human process designed to help both of us make an informed decision.

All final candidates will be asked to complete a background check and employment verifications as part of our pre-employment process.