Engineering Manager - Loancrate

What is Loancrate?

We started Loancrate to make home-buying simpler and less expensive for lenders and borrowers. Today, mortgage lenders are stuck running their companies on software products built 20 years ago. These products are slow, unstable, and don't lead to material improvements in efficiency. When using these systems, the average human cost to originate a loan is still over $11,000.

Loancrate builds AI-native tooling to automate mortgage workflows. Our ultimate goal is fully automated origination, which has the potential to save lenders over $16B in operating expense per year.

Since starting in 2020, our remote team has enabled our customers to power >$85 billion in new home loans. We care about collaboration, open communication covering the good & the bad so that we learn from our decisions quickly, and ultimately having fun while we're building.

The Opportunity

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to own the health, output, and trajectory of one of our engineering pods (~6–8 engineers), reporting to the Head of Engineering. You'll own your pod’s operating system: people, execution, delivery health, cross-functional partnership, and continuous improvement. You'll partner with a Technical Lead on architecture and technical quality, and with a Product Manager on what's worth building.

Our product runs some of the most complex, high-stakes workflows in financial services, and when our software is wrong, someone's home purchase is at risk. That reality shapes how we build and how we manage.

What To Expect

• First Day: Ship something to production. It's a team tradition to ensure managers stay connected to what engineers actually do.
• First 30 Days: Establish weekly 1:1s with every direct report, understand the pod's roadmap, codebase, and dependencies, and identify blockers.
• First 60 Days: Take full ownership of the pod’s operating cadence (planning, retros, and follow-through), catch delivery risks early, and partner closely on prioritization.
• First 90 Days: Make performance expectations explicit, actively address performance gaps, ramp new hires quickly, and foster pod independence.

Core Responsibilities

• Pod Effectiveness: Create clarity around priorities, ownership, and expectations. Own operating cadences, remove blockers, and balance psychological safety with high standards.
• Execution: Be accountable for delivery, spot risks early, and intervene when projects stall or are poorly scoped.
• People Management: Run weekly 1:1s, provide continuous feedback, monitor retention/burnout risk, and address performance gaps directly.
• Onboarding: Set up real work before day one, drive high-touch onboarding, and maintain documentation to ensure fast ramps.
• Product Partnership: Challenge unclear requirements and represent engineering tradeoffs (urgency, cost, quality, scope) to stakeholders.
• Technical Partnership: Partner with the Technical Lead on architecture and technical risk while maintaining enough technical depth to challenge plans.
• Staffing & Design: Recommend hiring based on organizational needs, interview candidates, and support succession planning.
• Communication: Give the Head of Engineering an honest picture of pod health, surface risks early, and communicate cross-pod dependencies.

Tech Stack

• Frontend: TypeScript, React, Vite, GraphQL/Apollo
• Backend: Node/Express (in Docker), GraphQL/Apollo, Postgres (Aurora)
• Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, Aurora, ElastiCache, MSK/Kafka, OpenSearch), Terraform, Pulumi
• Monorepo: Turborepo/PNPM monorepo with types generated from Postgres and GraphQL schemas

Preferred Skills & Background

• Experience managing engineers directly (ideally 5+ on a product or platform team)
• A credible engineering background with the ability to read PRs and evaluate design docs
• Track record of delivery and making teams predictably better at shipping
• Fluency with modern AI product development (evals, experiment design, non-deterministic systems)
• Comfort with ambiguity and high-complexity domains
• Strong product partnership instincts and crisp written communication
• Directness with care, operational reliability instincts, and security awareness

Perks & Benefits

• Robust medical coverage (100% of employee + family premiums covered)
• Vision & dental coverage
• 401(k)
• HSA / FSA
• Access to lender partner's employee loan program
• Remote-first culture
• Flexible time off