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Salary: USD 200,000 - 230,000 / annual
Benepass is a Series B fintech platform that makes employee benefits customizable and easy to administer. The company has raised ~$75M and is backed by investors including Workday Ventures, Threshold Ventures, and Portage Ventures.
As Engineering Manager (M3) on Core Services, you will lead a team of 4–6 backend engineers responsible for the critical-path systems that power the platform: the ledger, decisioning engine, schedules, rules engine, HRIS integrations, authentication, and directory. You will report to the VP of Engineering and share Core Services leadership with a peer manager—a structure designed to scale leadership without creating bottlenecks.
This is a hands-on manager role. You own people, execution, and outcomes for your team slice. You stay technically credible—reviewing designs, spiking prototypes, debugging when it matters—without trying to be the best individual contributor in the room. Your job is to create the environment (clarity, staffing, culture) so engineers can own architecture and delivery. Managers own team execution; project leads own project outcomes; engineers own quality and impact.
Key responsibilities:
- Manage and grow a team of backend engineers; hire, onboard, and level against the company's IC matrix.
- Run 1:1s focused on growth, not status. Give feedback early, including difficult feedback.
- Coach project leads on kickoff, technical approach, weekly updates, and release.
- Translate company priorities into a sequenced plan; raise timeline risks early and make scope tradeoffs explicit rather than slipping quietly.
- Own team execution end-to-end—stay engaged until problems are solved, not just when tickets close.
- Protect operational load (production health, incidents, correctness work) alongside roadmap projects.
- Lead design reviews on critical-path systems. Champion simple, correct, observable patterns.
- Jump into code, prototypes, or production debugging when it unblocks the team or validates hard tradeoffs, then step back.
- Hold the line on invariants that matter for money and eligibility: idempotency, auditability, reconciliation, safe retries.
- Partner with Client Apps, Platform, Customer Engineering, Product, and Ops to ensure Core Services is easy to build on, not a bottleneck.
- Share context early, document decisions, surface risks before they become problems.
- Use AI heavily in your own work—coding, debugging, design, planning, writing, analysis, 1:1 prep, hiring, communication. This is a personal practice, not a talking point. You hold AI-assisted work to the same standard of correctness and craft as everything else. You coach the team in effective AI use without adding ceremony.
The company operates on clear principles: own outcomes (not activity), use projects as the unit of work, maintain one roadmap with real tradeoffs, build high trust and high accountability, move fast through simplicity, work in the open, be AI-native, and deliver what you commit to. You are expected to attend company-wide on-site events three times per year.
Tech stack: Python, Django, Django Rest Framework, PostgreSQL, AWS, Docker, React/TypeScript.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading teams of ~3–8 engineers (or equivalent scope), ideally in a startup or SaaS environment.
- Deep technical expertise in Python/Django or equivalent backend systems; ability to guide architecture, review PRs, and contribute code when it matters. Think in systems, not endpoints.
- Proven ability to lead design reviews, enforce engineering standards, and prototype in Python/Django or comparable backend stack. Comfortable on systems where correctness and reliability are non-negotiable.
- Experience mentoring engineers through 1:1s, setting growth goals against a leveling matrix, handling performance issues directly, and hiring.
- Track record of shipping on commitments, creating clarity from ambiguity, and running a healthy SDLC without turning process into the product.
- Heavy personal use of AI in your own work—coding, debugging, planning, writing, operating a team. You can describe your workflow in concrete terms. You have used it to increase your effectiveness and a team's effectiveness, not as a demo. You review and own the output. Candidates who "support AI adoption" but barely use it themselves are not a fit.
BONUS SKILLS:
- Experience in fintech, payments, card issuing, wallets, or benefits platforms—especially ledgers, authorization/decisioning, or money movement.
- Experience owning high-integrity backend systems (financial, eligibility, identity, large-scale integrations) where small mistakes have real customer or money impact.
- Experience splitting or scaling a team—taking a group that has outgrown one manager and making two healthy teams without creating an A/B split.
- Proven ability to set and use team KPIs (reliability, cycle time, incident health, delivery against commitments).
- Experience evaluating tools (CI/CD, observability) to increase leverage, not ceremony.
- Strong background in performance management: promotion cases, PIPs, hiring pipelines you would send a friend through.
