What are the responsibilities and job description for the Engineering Manager position at CarNow?
Engineering Manager
Summary:
The Apps Engineering Manager is responsible for leading a cross-functional application engineering team that designs, builds, and supports customer-facing and internal web applications. This role blends hands-on technical leadership with people management and delivery accountability.
This is a player/coach position. The Apps Engineering Manager will mentor and grow engineers while remaining closely aligned to system architecture, code quality, and execution. This leader partners closely with Product, Design, Data, DevOps, and other Engineering teams to deliver reliable, scalable, and high-quality solutions that directly impact business performance.
Responsibilities:
Team Leadership & Development
- Lead, mentor, and develop a team of application engineers (frontend and backend).
- Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development planning.
- Set clear expectations and foster a culture of accountability, ownership, and psychological safety.
- Identify high performers and proactively coach team members with clear improvement plans when needed.
- Partner with Recruiting to define role requirements, interview candidates, and onboard new hires.
- Maintain effective team rituals including standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and demos.
Delivery & Execution
- Own end-to-end delivery across assigned applications and platform areas.
- Collaborate with Product to shape roadmaps, clarify requirements, and align on measurable outcomes.
- Ensure consistent sprint goal achievement and proactive risk communication.
- Drive predictable execution through clear scoping, estimation, and definitions of ready/done.
- Coordinate cross-functional dependencies and remove organizational blockers.
- Lead prioritization and mitigation for P0/P1 issues.
Technical Leadership
- Provide architectural guidance for web applications, APIs, integrations, and workflows.
- Define and enforce engineering standards, frameworks, and best practices.
- Elevate code quality, testing standards, CI/CD practices, and observability.
- Make pragmatic build vs. buy and short-term vs. long-term tradeoff decisions.
- Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to ensure scalability, security, and performance.
Operational Excellence
- Own SLAs/SLOs and reliability standards for managed services.
- Lead incident response efforts and drive postmortem follow-through.
- Improve tooling, automation, and engineering processes to reduce friction and increase productivity.
- Monitor and communicate key engineering performance metrics.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Partner with Product Management to align engineering delivery with company goals.
- Collaborate with Design, Data, Sales, Customer Success, and Operations to ensure customer-centric solutions.
- Serve as the primary engineering contact for assigned domain areas.
- Represent the Apps team in broader engineering leadership initiatives.
Requirements:
Required
- 5 years of professional software engineering experience building web applications or services.
- 2 years of experience in a formal or informal engineering leadership role.
- Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives from planning through production.
- Strong understanding of modern web architecture, APIs, and scalable systems.
- Experience with code review, testing practices, CI/CD, and monitoring tools.
- Demonstrated ability to balance delivery speed with quality and maintainability.
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred
- Experience in SaaS or high-growth technology environments.
- Familiarity with cloud-based infrastructure and DevOps practices.
- Experience scaling engineering teams and processes.
- Background working closely with Product and Design in agile environments.
Salary : $140,000 - $160,000