Senior Engineering Manager, Language Learning

About the role

You will co-lead a cross-functional team in close partnership with product management, aligning on strategy, priorities, and success metrics for features that enhance how we teach. You will drive execution of projects from initial specification through implementation, experimentation, analysis, and ongoing ownership while ensuring infrastructure reliability, scalability, and observability. You will leverage data and rapid experimentation to inform decisions, partnering with internal stakeholders to design A/B tests and translate insights into product improvements that measurably impact learning KPIs. You will attract, grow, and retain diverse engineering talent by providing clear expectations, coaching, and career development to build a healthy and inclusive team culture. You will set and enforce engineering quality standards and processes that balance speed with long-term maintainability, proactively managing technical debt, product quality, and operational excellence. You will collaborate closely with product, design, research, and other engineering teams to deliver user experiences that serve user needs while being impactful towards business metrics. You will define team OKRs, ruthlessly prioritize work, and remove roadblocks to enable your teams to perform their best work.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Co-lead a cross-functional team with partners in product management, aligning on strategy, priorities, and success metrics for features that help us teach better.
• Drive execution of projects from spec to implementation, experimentation/analysis, and ongoing ownership, while ensuring infrastructure reliability, scalability, and observability.
• Use data and rapid experimentation to inform decisions; partner with internal stakeholders to design A/B tests and translate insights into product improvements that measurably impact learning KPIs.
• Attract, grow, and retain diverse engineering talent; provide clear expectations, coaching, and career development, and build a healthy, inclusive team culture.
• Set engineering quality standards and processes that balance speed and long-term maintainability; proactively manage tech debt, product quality, and operational excellence.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, research, and other engineering teams to deliver user experiences that serve user needs while being impactful towards business metrics.
• Define team OKRs, ruthlessly prioritize, and remove roadblocks to enable teams to do their best work.
• Partner with analytics and data science teams to design experiments that generate actionable insights and drive continuous improvement in the learning experience.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of key features within the short-form lesson ecosystem, coordinating dependencies and managing timelines.
• Mentor engineers at all levels, providing guidance on technical design, code quality, and career growth within a fast-paced learning environment.
• Ensure that products remain performant, reliable, and scalable under high load by collaborating with platform and infrastructure teams.
• Translate complex product requirements into clear technical specifications and communicate progress transparently to stakeholders.
• Contribute to architectural decisions that support experimentation, personalization, and long-term product vision.
• Champion best practices in software engineering, testing, and deployment to maintain high standards of quality and reliability.

Requirements

• Experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers, with demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain talent.
• A track record of shipping multi-engineer, multi-week+ projects with measurable business impact, balancing speed and quality.
• Strong product instincts and comfort in highly experimental, data‑driven environments; experience defining metrics and running A/B tests with analytics or data science partners.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills across engineering, product, design, and data; clear written specs and status updates.
• Technical depth sufficient to guide architecture and implementation trade‑offs, evolve quality standards, and mentor engineers on best practices.
• The ability to work from or relocate to Pittsburgh, PA or New York, NY.
• A bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 8 years of total work experience, with at least 3 years in a people management role.
• Demonstrated success in managing and scaling high-performing engineering teams.
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to make decisions in a fast-paced, iterative environment.

Nice to have

• Experience leading cross-functional product-focused teams in consumer products.
• Experience setting team OKRs and operating cadences that consistently deliver outsized impact on company‑level metrics.
• Background dealing with ambiguity and managing broad-scoped projects.

Practical notes

• Full-time position.
• Work location must be Pittsburgh, PA or New York, NY or willingness to relocate.
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future.
• Only candidates who meet the stated requirements will be contacted.