Engineering Manager, Marketplace

Paraform; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Paraform is seeking an engineering leader to own the Marketplace team. You will manage a pod of engineers, partner closely with the marketplace product lead and data science, and be accountable for outcomes, not output: role coverage, recruiter activation and retention, hiring velocity for our customers.

This player-coach role blends leadership with hands-on coding as Paraform scales. You will set the roadmap, drive incentives and pricing, and promote rigorous experimentation while building a

Qualifications

• 2+ years managing engineers (Manager) or 5+ years across multiple teams or managers.
• Experience in marketplaces, payments, pricing, or incentive-driven systems.
• Data fluency to pull SQL, sanity-check experiment readouts, and challenge metrics.
• Familiarity with AI tools and how to raise team leverage with them.
• Strong writing and documentation skills to guide fast-growing teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a pod of senior engineers, hiring, coaching, and setting expectations.
• Own marketplace health: allocation, matching, and distribution systems.
• Shape incentives, pricing, and related financial mechanics.
• Build experimentation muscle: A/B tests, guardrails, and reliable significance.
• Translate business goals into quarterly roadmaps and deliver shared outcomes.
• Be hands-on in a fast-moving codebase when needed.

Skills

People management

Marketplace/domain knowledge

Data fluency (SQL)

AI fluency/tools

Technical leadership & system design

Clear written communication

Job description

The Role:

We have 15 engineers and more than $100M in ARR, and we're scaling the engineering team roughly 3x over the next year. The Marketplace team sits at the center of that: it owns how supply (recruiters) meets demand (companies and their open roles), and every improvement it ships moves revenue directly.

We're hiring an engineering leader to own the Marketplace team. You'll manage a pod of strong engineers, partner closely with the marketplace product lead and data science, and be accountable for outcomes, not output: role coverage, recruiter activation and retention, hiring velocity for our customers. Title (Manager or Director) depends on your experience; the ownership doesn't.

This is a player-coach role. At our size, leaders still read PRs, debug incidents, and occasionally ship. You'll spend most of your time on people, prioritization, and system design, but you should be dangerous in the codebase.

What You'll Own:

• The team. Hire, coach, and level a pod of senior-leaning engineers. We run small autonomous teams with high judgment expectations, and we promote on judgment, not lines of code.

• Marketplace health. Liquidity is the core problem: making sure every open role gets real recruiter attention, and every good recruiter has roles worth working. You'll own the allocation, matching, and distribution systems that balance the two sides.

• Incentives and pricing. Payments, bonuses, and pricing mechanics that shape recruiter behavior. This is where economics meets engineering, and where careless changes cost real money.

• Experimentation. Marketplace changes get validated, not vibes-checked. You'll build the team's muscle for A/B testing, guardrail metrics, and knowing when an experiment result is real.

• Roadmap and delivery. Turn ambiguous business goals into a quarterly plan the team believes in, then ship it.

What We're Looking For:

• 2+ years managing engineers (Manager) or 5+ years including managing multiple teams or managers (Director), on top of a strong IC background

• You've worked on a marketplace, payments, pricing, or another domain where the system's incentives matter as much as its code

• Data-fluent: you can pull your own SQL, sanity-check an experiment readout, and push back on a bad metric

• AI fluency is a floor here, not a differentiator. You use AI tools in your own work and you know how to raise a team's leverage with them

• You write things down. Operating norms, decision docs, postmortems. Clarity in writing is how small teams stay fast as they grow

• Comfortable being hands-on in a fast-moving codebase

Why This Role:

Marketplace is the highest-leverage engineering seat at Paraform. The systems your team built decide how thousands of recruiters earn a living and how companies make their most important hires. You'll shape the team's culture and technical direction while the org is still small enough that your decisions compound.

About Paraform:

Paraform is a marketplace modernizing one of the largest and most fragmented markets in the world: hiring. We partner with industry leaders like Decagon, Palantir, Rippling, Abridge, and Hightouch to hire world-class talent, and are growing quickly - 8×-ing revenue last year.

Paraform is the first end-to-end AI recruiting marketplace that connects companies with thousands of specialized recruiters and AI agents that work together to fill roles faster and more accurately.

Our mission is to make hiring fast, reliable, and scalable for every company in the world.

At Paraform, we believe recruiting works best when the right people are working on the right problems, combining human judgment with AI that truly understands hiring. That’s why we’re building a new foundation for how companies hire, bringing together specialized recruiters and modern AI tools.

We treat recruiters like entrepreneurs, not vendors – and we’re building the financial, operational, and technical infrastructure that powers their success.

We are backed by the best investors and technology leaders: Scale, Felicis, A*, BOND, Liquid 2, DST Global, the founders of YouTube, Instacart, Canva, and more.