Manager, Engineering

Manager, Engineering RemoteWho We Are: We're a high-growth software company with a big mission: empowering K-12 district teams to do more with less.At LINQ, we get K12. That's why we help districts transform K-12 school operations with best-in-class, cloud-based software solutions built to help districts return more resources to classrooms. Integrating finance, HR, nutrition management, and payments into a single, secure platform, LINQ reduces administrative burden. LINQ is trusted by 30% of school districts across the U.S. to help them operate more efficiently and serve over 1 billion meals to 17 million students annually, process payroll for 364,000 educators, administrators, and staff, and engage with millions of families through the free LINQ Connect app.Our team? They're talented, committed, and fiercely loyal problem-solvers. At LINQ, you'll find challenging and meaningful work, a team that respects and uplifts one another, and a commitment to constant improvement. Our customers love us because we're attentive, patient, communicative, and solutions focused. They know they can count on us to not only anticipate their needs but to deliver the right answer every time.LINQ's Values:Act with Integrity & Build Trust: Trust is the foundation of our company. We operate with the highest standards of integrity, both internally and externally. We believe in transparency, honesty, and accountability. Building a culture where trust is earned and maintained.Deliver Excellence: We consistently exceed our clients' expectations. In every interaction, we strive to anticipate needs, provide swift solutions, and go the extra mile to relentlessly impress our customers. We communicate clearly, consistently, and in a timely way to cultivate lasting relationships.Embrace Challenges: We embrace a growth mindset. Challenges offer opportunities to learn, grow, and improve. Continuous learning keeps us relevant and effective to ensure our solutions remain on the leading edge of innovation.Collaborate & Act as One Team: Diverse skills, ideas, and perspectives are our strength. Through open communication, shared goals, and a spirit of unity and mutual respect, we collaborate to achieve excellence, drive innovation, and propel our company forward as a cohesive force.About the TeamOur Payments team builds the platform that moves real money between school districts, families, and payment partners nationwide. Every transaction matters — a parent loading lunch money before the bell, a cafeteria terminal charging at the register, a nightly settlement landing in a district's bank account. Reliability, accuracy, and financial integrity aren't features - they're the floor. We're building the next generation of K-12 payments, giving districts confidence in their funds and families a seamless way to pay for what their students rely on every day.About the PositionAs an Engineering Manager for Payments, you will lead the engineering team(s) that own the payment engine and admin tooling behind LINQ's payments platform - the software responsible for moving real money between school districts, families, and LINQ's payment partners. You'll partner closely with the Sr. Director of Engineering, senior engineers on your team, and Product leadership to ship software where reliability, data accuracy, and operational rigor are non-negotiable.This is a player/coach role that leans firmly toward coach. Roughly 80% of your time is spent leading people - hiring, coaching, unblocking, raising the bar, and driving delivery - and the remaining time is spent where a manager's technical leverage is highest: architecture and design reviews, high-stakes code review, pairing on hard problems, and jumping into the code when production needs you. You're not here to pick up sprint tickets, but you are close enough to the code that your engineers trust your technical instincts and you can carry real weight during an incident - which matters more in payments than almost anywhere else.What You'll Be DoingLead and grow a team of engineers across a blended FTE/contractor model - running meaningful 1:1s, writing growth plans, managing performance honestly, and giving direct, kind, actionable feedbackOwn delivery outcomes for the Payments platform - partnering with Product to shape the work, not just receive it, and driving predictable, high-quality executionPartner with the Sr. Director of Engineering and your engineers to shape and execute the technical roadmap - balancing new product capabilities, infrastructure modernization, and platform reliabilityKeep operational excellence front and center - reconciliation, webhook resilience, retry and idempotency patterns, and data accuracy in the face of third-party outages are the baseline expectation, not a stretch goalRaise the hiring bar and own the hiring loop for your team - sourcing, interview calibration, and closing talentContribute as a technical leader in ADRs, design reviews, and high-stakes code reviews; weigh in on tradeoffs with enough depth that your technical voice genuinely sharpens the workDrive healthy engineering practices - testing discipline, CI/CD, DORA/flow metrics, and incident response - using evidence to guide improvement rather than opinion aloneEnable the team to adopt AI-assisted development tooling (Claude Code) effectively and responsibly, modeling the practices yourselfCultivate a culture where engineers are confident to change code - when people are afraid to touch something, we move slowly and we break things, and in payments that has a direct financial consequenceCommunicate up, across, and down clearly in writing - roadmaps, status, risks, tradeoffs, and decisionsWhat We Are Looking ForCore Experience3+ years managing software engineering teams, with a track record of shipping production software at qualityExperience managing mixed FTE and contractor teams - with a clear sense of where those management approaches converge and divergeStrong technical background in Node.js and modern JavaScript/TypeScript service development; you've shipped real systems and are sharp enough to contribute credibly in design and code reviewsComfort with Angular or a close-adjacent modern front-end frameworkHands-on experience leading teams that build payments, fintech, or other integration-heavy systems where data accuracy, idempotency, and reconciliation with external systems are core concernsEvidence-based management approach - familiar with DORA, SPACE, or equivalent frameworks, and honest about their limitsAWS & Cloud ArchitectureProduction experience working in AWS environments; comfortable reasoning about container-based deployment (ECS/EKS), serverless services, and managed databasesExperience leading teams through infrastructure modernization (e.g., containerization migrations) without disrupting deliveryPayments & Integration DomainFamiliarity with payment gateway integrations, tokenization, settlement flows, and dispute/chargeback managementUnderstanding of PCI DSS scope reduction strategies and the operational realities of relying on tokenization vendorsDemonstrated experience hardening integrations with unreliable third-party systems - webhook handling, reconciliation jobs, eventual consistency, and graceful degradationAI-Assisted DevelopmentHands-on user of Claude Code, Cursor, or similar AI-assisted coding environmentsAble to coach a team on effective, responsible use of AI tooling — and honest about where it works and where it doesn'tAdditional RequirementsCoaching-first instinct - you default to asking before telling, and help people think clearly rather than thinking for themDirect communicator - you can challenge respectfully, escalate clearly, and write a crisp exec updateFluent in Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD practicesWhat Will Make You Stand OutExperience in payments, payroll processing, fintech, or K-12 EdTechBackground managing teams that operate high-transaction-volume, real-money-movement systemsExperience running blended onshore/offshore or FTE/contractor engineering teams at scaleExperience splitting or merging teams as organizational scope evolvesHands-on experience with terminal/EMV or in-person payment integrationsExperience launching hosted checkout, embedded payments, or PSP-style productsContributions to engineering