Engineering Manager

PropTech · Toronto (Hybrid) · Full-Time

2 to 3 Days in Office (Mondays, Thursdays and Every Second Tuesday) · $160,000 – $210,000 CAD base

Placed by Sage Recruiting on behalf of a confidential client.

Candidates outside the Toronto area will only be considered if they already have concrete plans to relocate.

ABOUT THE COMPANY

A Toronto tech company building a home management platform for homeowners, plus a marketplace that connects them with trusted local service providers. The business is growing city by city and puts local trust and fair dealing at its core. Its model keeps commissions small and charges them only on completed work, so the best providers can afford to say yes. The aim is for the tech to work for local service providers, not the other way around.

If you're at a point in your career where you want to take on something hard for an outcome that matters, this could be your next move.

ROLE OVERVIEW

This role has three parts. You'll lead engineers, work closely with a Product Manager and Designer as a "product trio," and collaborate with other engineering leaders on shared needs and concerns.

You won't write code yourself, but you'll stay deep in the technical details of your team's work so you can unblock them, challenge them, and help them improve as individuals and as a team.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

Engineering leadership

• Support and manage a team of 6 to 8 software engineers
• Guide architecture, design, data modelling and implementation choices within your team
• Set the team on a path of steady improvement in technical practices, delivery processes and systems thinking
• Build a healthy, cohesive team culture with high engagement, shared ownership, and the ability to largely self-organize
• Involve engineers in discovery and make sure they understand and apply the "why" behind their work
• Help engineers grow their craft and careers, keep them motivated, and give frequent informal feedback and semi-annual reviews

Working with your Product Manager and Designer

• Discover and understand customer needs
• Test different ways to meet those needs and find which are most effective and keep users coming back
• Assess feasibility, cost, risk and technical challenges early, and weigh them when choosing what to pursue
• Challenge ideas constructively, push back on options that are too costly or risky, and propose simpler alternatives
• Break large features into smaller steps for incremental delivery, fast feedback, and room to adjust as you learn
• Balance new capabilities against the functional and technical health of the existing product
• Share accountability for outcomes, not just output

Collaborating with other Tech Leads and Engineering Managers

• Technical choices, practices and processes that affect multiple teams
• Boundaries and dependencies between teams and systems, including domain modelling, API definitions, information flows and composable UIs
• Improving how the org uses infrastructure, CI/CD, test automation, AI assistants and agents, and other tools for development, testing, troubleshooting and security
• Hiring
• Engineering culture
• Making sure every subsystem has a clear owning team responsible for its support and long-term health

WHAT YOU BRING

• 7+ years of hands-on product engineering experience
• 2+ years as a tech lead or engineering manager in a full-time enabling role (not also doing hands-on development)
• 2+ years working closely with a Product Manager and UX Designer to jointly lead a cross-functional team
• Strong fundamentals in software architecture, design, development, testing and production support
• Sound judgment in spotting trade-offs and improvement opportunities, both in the product and in how the team works
• Experience with experimentation, incremental delivery and tight feedback loops, where user behaviour shapes the product
• Ability to hold the big picture while working in the details, and the reverse
• Track record of building collaboration and alignment with engineers and cross-functional peers, mentoring, and giving constructive feedback
• Excellent communication, leadership, organizational and problem-solving skills
• Ability to create shared understanding among engineers, product managers, designers and customer-facing teams

NICE TO HAVE

• Cloud-based distributed systems
• Experience with much of the stack: TypeScript, Node.js, React, React Native, Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, AWS, K8s, Terraform, PHP/Laravel
• Evolving or replacing messy legacy systems step by step
• SaaS products that serve both small businesses and consumers
• Marketplace products that balance the needs of different participants
• Guiding a team through ambiguity and bringing clarity to fast-changing situations
• Navigating trade-offs between short- and long-term needs, and between features, technical health and business goals
• Security, data privacy, and compliance with Canadian requirements for accessibility, privacy, payments and anti-spam rules