Senior Engineering Manager, Product

Brightwheel; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Brightwheel is reinventing early education software with AI-powered workflows that anticipate needs and automate safe actions for school leaders, teachers, and families. We’re seeking an hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a full-stack team and partner with Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to deliver measurable impact.

You will own product quality, reliability, and security while guiding architecture and operational health across web, mobile, and backend systems.

Qualifications

• Led an engineering team delivering measurable customer or business results.
• Demonstrated depth to challenge architecture, product decisions, data reliability, and operations.
• Set engineering strategy with explicit investment and prioritization choices.
• Shipped an AI-powered product or workflow to production with measurable impact.
• Hired and developed strong engineers, built succession, and managed performance issues directly.
• Built trusted partnerships across Product, Design, and business teams with a clear Engineering POV.

Responsibilities

• Lead a full-stack engineering team from problem definition through production, measurement, and iteration.
• Translate company goals into clear outcomes, investment choices, and a credible execution plan.
• Set the engineering strategy for quality, reliability, security, privacy, and operational health.
• Ship AI-powered products and change how the team works with AI — not just add AI features.
• Hire and develop strong engineers, set a clear bar, and act when the team or an individual is below it.
• Make capacity, dependencies, forecasts, and risks visible early.
• Partner with Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to turn customer problems into shipped product with measurable adoption and impact.
• Own product and platform health across web, mobile, and backend systems, including rollout, reliability, privacy, and support impact.
• Use customer behavior, operational signals, and production data to decide what to build, simplify, or stop.

Skills

Team leadership

Technical depth

Engineering strategy

AI product delivery

People development

Cross-functional partnerships

Tools

Ruby on Rails

Sidekiq

React with TypeScript

Swift

Kotlin

Jetpack Compose

PostgreSQL

Redis

Docker

Kubernetes on EKS

AWS

AWS Bedrock

Job description

Our Mission and Opportunity

Early education is one of the most important determinants of childhood outcomes, a critical support for working families, and a $175B market that remains underserved by modern technology. Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day. We are a three-time Cloud 100 company, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban.

Our Team

Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. We embody our Leadership Principles in our work and culture. We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally.

Our Mission and Opportunity

Early education is one of the greatest determinants of childhood outcomes, is a must for working families, and has lasting social and economic impact. Brightwheel's vision is high quality early education for every child. We pursue this by directly supporting teachers in the classroom, engaging parents in the development of their kids, and enabling the small businesses that make up the backbone of the $175 billion early education industry. Brightwheel is the most loved technology brand in early education, trusted by tens of thousands of providers and millions of educators and families.

About the role

Our team is passionate, talented, and deeply customer-focused. We build the platform that thousands of early education programs rely on every day to run their business, serve families, and support children's growth. As a vertical SaaS company, brightwheel already sits in the middle of the key workflows in early education. We are extending that foundation into a system of action- where software not only records what happened, but also anticipates work, recommends next steps, and takes safe, automated action on behalf of school leaders, teachers, families, and our internal teams.

We're looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager who combines strong people leadership, technical judgment, and ownership of measurable outcomes. In this role, you will lead a team building customer-facing products that help school leaders, teachers, and families save time, make better decisions, and run stronger programs. You'll partner closely with Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to define what to build, then take it through production, adoption, and measurable customer impact.

What you'll do

• Lead a full-stack engineering team from problem definition through production, measurement, and iteration.
• Translate company goals into clear outcomes, investment choices, and a credible execution plan.
• Set the engineering strategy for quality, reliability, security, privacy, and operational health.
• Ship AI-powered products and change how the team works with AI - not just add AI features.
• Hire and develop strong engineers, set a clear bar, and act when the team or an individual is below it.
• Make capacity, dependencies, forecasts, and risks visible early.
• Partner early with Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to turn customer problems into shipped product with measurable adoption and impact.
• Own product and platform health across web, mobile, and backend systems, including rollout, reliability, privacy, and support impact.
• Use customer behavior, operational signals, and production data to decide what to build, simplify, or stop.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have led an engineering team that delivered measurable customer or business results.
• Have the technical depth to challenge architecture, product, data, reliability, and operational decisions without taking the work away from the team.
• Have set engineering strategy and made explicit investment and prioritization choices.
• Have shipped an AI-powered product or workflow to production and can explain the measurable result.
• Have hired and developed strong engineers, built succession, and handled performance issues directly.
• Have built trusted partnerships across Product, Design, and business teams while representing a clear Engineering point of view.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience in vertical SaaS, education, fintech, healthcare, CRM, ecommerce, or another operations-heavy domain.
• Led a material change in product direction, architecture, or operating model.
• Built production AI products, agents, evaluation systems, or automation.
• Experience building customer-facing products with measurable adoption or outcome impact.
• Experience using customer feedback and production data to improve web, mobile, or backend product outcomes.

Technology

• Backend: Ruby on Rails and Sidekiq.
• Frontend and mobile: React with TypeScript; native iOS with Swift and Android with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose.
• Data and infrastructure: PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, and AWS.
• AI and automation: AWS Bedrock and other hosted models, vector search, orchestration frameworks, and modern AI coding tools.

Brightwheel is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.