About Us
We’re a nationwide (US) two-sided marketplace that connects people who need to transport hard-to-move items with professional drivers who can get the job done, with a strong emphasis on pet transportation. Our platform serves the entire U.S., with active categories including pets, motorcycles, boats, cars, heavy equipment, LTL freight, and more. As we grow, our focus is on building fast, scalable solutions that help people move things more efficiently, affordably, and reliably.
About the Role
We are seeking a hands-on Senior Engineering Manager who will be the Head of Engineering for our fast-paced, growing organization, who can bridge the business and technical domains.
You will be responsible for people leadership, process excellence, and technical direction. You will step into the architecture, process, and code, guiding and holding accountable senior engineers with engineering best practices while also acting as a critical liaison between business and engineering, ensuring business goals translate into technical outcomes. We expect you to grow into a Director/VP as we scale.
What you’ll own
- People management (40 %)
- Lead and coach a fully remote team of senior full-stack, backend, and DevOps engineers spanning US & EU time zones.
- Run weekly 1-on-1s, quarterly growth plans, and performance reviews.
- Own hiring pipeline, onboarding, and drive a measurable lift in team engagement.
- Process management (35 %)
- Establish Jira (or equivalent) as the single source of truth-clear WIP limits, Definition-of-Ready/Done, and weekly demos.
- Launch lightweight guardrails: trunk-based flow, CI/CD gates, prod-parity staging, and an engineering metrics dashboard.
- Facilitate regular retros and maintain a living Risk/RAID log.
- Technical ownership (25 %)
- Serve as day-to-day technical authority-approve architecture decisions and sequencing with our senior engineers.
- Review high-risk PRs, guide schema contracts, and steward the retirement of legacy systems.
- Champion pragmatic adoption of AI/LLM capabilities and performance optimisations.
First 90 days - success looks like:
- A transparent engineering dashboard is live, tracking cycle-time, delivery predictability, and change-failure rate.
- The team is shipping production releases on a reliable, weekly cadence through newly implemented guardrails.
- The engineering charter and career ladder are published, and every engineer has a growth plan.
- Cross-functional demo rhythm is in place, increasing stakeholder confidence and feedback loops.
- Initial technical debt inventory is prioritised and scheduled against business goals.
- 1-page Engineering Charter & career ladder ratified.
About you
- 6-10 years in software engineering; ≥ 3 years managing distributed teams (<15 devs).
- Proven rescues of at least one mission-critical, customer-facing project.
- Fluent in JavaScript/TypeScript and Node/React; comfortable reading Kubernetes YAML.
- Track record of instituting flow-based delivery (Kanban, trunk-based).
- Data-driven storyteller turns Git/Sentry/Jira metrics into executive insight.
- Culture builder: balances psychological safety with high accountability.
- Bonus: experience sunsetting legacy stacks and/or integrating AI/ML workflows.
Our current stack
- Frontend: React, TypeScript
- Backend: Node.js, Express
- Data: PostgreSQL (legacy MySQL shadow writes)
- Ops: AWS (K8s on DigitalOcean), Docker, GitHub Actions
- Tooling: Jira, Sentry, Datadog, Figma
Growth path
Year-1 focus is SDM-level execution; Year-2 targets promotion to Director of Engineering based on team scale and KPI results.
How We Work
- We value clarity, accountability, and transparency.
- You will help us institutionalize engineering hygiene: retrospectives, demos, metrics dashboards, and process improvements.
- You will work closely with leadership to ensure engineering roadmaps drive key business outcomes.
- You will play a key role in scaling both the platform and the team, as CitizenShipper moves into its next phase of growth.
If you’re passionate about building both systems and cultures and want to help a strong team level up execution and velocity, let’s talk.
