Engineering Manager

👋 Hi, I’m Martin, Chief Technology Officer at Zen Educate and I’m looking for an Engineering Manager who can make an impact on the real-world problem of education staffing, and do it by leading a team in engineering excellence.

 

Every place has its own understanding of what engineering excellence looks like (sometimes written down, sometimes not). Here’s what it means to me and Zen:

We are a small, but mighty team and so every person has the opportunity to make an outsized impact and put their stamp on what excellence looks like in practice. What do I mean by “small”? Today we have 21 Product Engineers, all reporting to one Senior Engineering Manager, working in small, dynamic teams across the Zen product.

 

We recognise the world is not static - “what got us here, won’t get us there” - so we look for curiosity, adaptability and proactiveness as fundamental traits. The leaders I see being most successful in Product and Tech are those who focus on identifying and solving problems, and then use technology to turn those solutions into scalable systems. We’re aiming for ‘antigravity’ - using automation to get faster and multiply impact as we scale.

 

This role is particularly exciting because you’ll be Zen’s first Engineering Manager in the US, where we’re enjoying rapid growth. You’ll thrive in this role if you’re someone who can build relationships quickly, take strong ownership of problems end-to-end and hire and grow a team around you 💪

Getting the right teacher into the right school at the right time is a crucial problem to solve, both for education outcomes for children and for the sustainability of an industry that spends billions on this.

 

Today the platform we are building supports internal operations teams on filling roles, educators on finding roles via our mobile app and schools on getting educators in for both short-term and long-term roles. The more we develop the platform (and the ability to self-serve in the marketplace), the more efficient the whole process becomes, which means more money going back to educators and into classrooms (over $65 million globally since 2017).

 

We are well established in the UK and growing at a phenomenal rate in the US 🚀

 

What we need now is to reach the next level in how we scale the engineering team to support this growth. That’s where you come in 😉

I’ve written a bunch of words above that I hope capture your interest and excitement ✨. But what really matters is what reality looks like and the best person to share that is the person already doing the job. So here’s a glimpse of work over the last few weeks from Sean, our Senior Engineering Manager:

“I’ve been building a system to automate the admin of managing lots of engineers, so I can focus on the fun, human parts of my role - great conversations with great people! Those have included 1:1s with Product Engineers exploring when work flows well for them and how to make that happen more often, interviewing Mission Leads to gather feedback ahead of our upcoming performance cycle, and working with our People Lead to navigate a tricky situation and manage the impact on my team.

I’ve been partnering with the CTO to develop our compensation and levelling philosophy. Following our last pay review cycle some of our engineers were promoted up a level, and so Martin and I spent a day celebrating them in the Product and Tech Slack channel, with messages for each individual calling out the impact they’ve had in the last six months - a real privilege!

I’ve also organised time for the team to come together: a ‘How I Work’ session where engineers shared their cool AI-powered workflows, a training session on running an excellent demo, and a social to celebrate a departing team member. With the team growing, I’ve been hiring manager for 5 new Product Engineers and I’ve helped train members of the team to run our tech loops. And I’ve just shipped a small bugfix, to keep my hand in!” 

The Engineering Manager role comes in many different shapes and sizes. At Zen, your primary focus will be people. You’ll be managing a large group of Product Engineers, but this isn’t a ‘people lead’ or ‘department head’ role: you’ll need to be close enough to your engineers and their work to help them grow, using tried-and-tested habits like excellent 1:1s and feedback to make this happen. In the background, you’ll spend time creating systems to automate processes, so you can invest your time in building relationships and increasing talent density in the team. As an Engineering Manager you can expect to be close to both the CTO and the CPO and their teams, and you’ll have the opportunity for huge influence and impact in Product and Tech.

Every place makes tradeoffs based on what they value and where they are in their journey ⚖️. Here’s a list of things you might find useful in figuring out if this is the right role for you. If we end up chatting, feel free to dig deeper into any of them. Note that some of these are recent changes in our approach and may be “work in progress” when you join.

Missions, not org charts. Teams form around outcomes, not reporting lines, and process exists only where it serves performance. Your reports will be spread across several Missions at once, so you manage people and their growth, not a team or a backlog.

 

Wide scope and real leverage. Engineering Managers at Zen manage a large group of Product Engineers (typically 10-15 individuals). We’re growing fast, and you’ll be a Hiring Manager from early on, running interviews, debriefs and offers with our talent team. You’ll succeed through coaching, feedback and building relationships - always thinking about how to increase the talent density in the team. You won’t necessarily be the best engineer in the room, but you will contribute to technical conversations and decision making, and there will always be opportunities to ship a small improvement or bugfix!

 

High expectations and strong investment. Every engineer here has their own specific strengths and their own route to impact. You’ll help each person identify and build on what we often call their spikiness - those skills and behaviours they can leverage to do something special. You’ll do this through conversations and feedback, and through celebrating the work they do. At Zen we don’t have competency grids or performance frameworks: instead we focus on recognising examples of excellence - the real impact people have - which will look different for each person at each level. This means we also spot early when something isn’t working and have the honest conversations that follow. Sometimes that leads to hard decisions, and we’ll work through those together.

 

Experimenting to unlock new opportunities, tried-and-tested for the rest. There are lots of exciting ways to leverage systems and automation to increase the impact of a single manager across a large team. You’ll constantly be experimenting with AI and tooling to take on the admin and add value, but you’ll lean on proven habits, like great 1:1s and honest feedback, for the parts that benefit most from a human relationship.

 

Celebrate often. We make a point of marking wins, learnings and goodbyes, and as an Engineering Manager you’ll be someone people look to as a champion of that. This will mean celebrating when people get promoted to a new level, and giving them a great send-off when they choose to move on to new opportunities. It will also sometimes mean having awkward or challenging 1:1s about performance, and being a stable point as you navigate rapid change with your team.

Choose your own career path. We care most about impact and learning and we don’t have rigid competency grids. This means greater flexibility in what progression looks like, but requires you to build an understanding of what we value from guiding principles and shared real-world examples.

 

Few titles, infinite Levels. Roles at Zen define your scope, and Levels show your growth within it. As an Engineering Manager, your scope is the group of engineers you lead. Within that there’s no ceiling: you’ll move up Levels as your impact through your team grows, in how they develop, what they deliver, and how sustinable their work is.

 

Investment over reward as a mindset. Level changes are tightly coupled to compensation changes. Confidence in a Level change is based on sustainably doing great work at your current level. We think it is fairer to invest in what you do next, rather than reward you doing the next Level first for free!

 

Your manager is a partner, not a supervisor. You'll have a manager, but they won't be directing your every move. Expect them to help you think through hard problems, offer perspective, and provide nudges to help you grow - not to tell you what to do or check your work. That means you'll need to take ownership of your own progress and speak up when you need unblocking. We’ll look to you to be this kind of manager too, and to model these behaviours to others.

Market reality. Compensation is based on your competitiveness in your local hiring market (note that’s not just where you live). We don’t believe anyone has found a great solution to global compensation, so we aim instead to be clear and equitable in how we do it.

 

Solid, but not flashy compensation. We pay decently, but we won’t beat out companies with deeper pockets (yet!).

 

Think long-term investment. If you are in a place where you need to prioritise immediate financial gain then this probably isn’t the right time to join us.

Distributed engineering team. Solid communication skills and async habits are key to being effective. You’ll find strong connection here, but not through engineering getting together in-person. As an Engineering Manager, that means building strong trust and connection with 10-15 people you’ll mostly work with remotely. If you like the buzz of working near others you are welcome to work from one of our offices, but there won’t be many members of the engineering team there on any given day.

 

We believe in impact and measurable outcomes, alongside shared learning. If your work moves the needle or teaches us something meaningful then that’s a win. If not, then we’ll want to understand why.

 

Balanced, sustainable work. Long hours are not a badge of honour - they are an indication something isn’t working well. We value a sustainable pace and healthy teams, and as an Engineering Manager you’ll be one of the people making that real.

 

Diversity is good in some ways and lacking in others. You might be the first of something here. That matters and we’ll support appropriately if you are.

Hire fast, fix fast.  Hiring today is...not great, with most companies being too cautious and taking too long to make a decision 😦. We move quicker - our ideal is: apply Monday, offer by Friday. Then we invest heavily in the most important part - your onboarding. We ensure you are set up for success, with clear direction, quality time with each of your engineers, and exposure to the Missions they’re working on.

 

Whilst fast doesn’t mean frivolous, it does slightly increase the risk that you or we made a mistake. So we include regular check-ins during onboarding to make sure expectations match reality. If either side feels something is off then we try to fix it fast. And sometimes that will mean saying “let’s not carry on” with respect.

 

Real talk. We believe in being direct and authentic. We’ll share the good, the messy and the challenges. We recognise we won’t have all the answers, still have much to learn, and that’s all part of the fun of this wild ride 🚀. We expect the same from you - after all we are just a bunch of humans trying to do great work together.

 

Mindset, not tools. We hire for how you think and create leverage, not what specific tools you’ve used before. To us, experience is just another tool - it is only valuable through how you leverage it. Curiosity, adaptability, good judgement - those are the durable qualities in a changing world. And we value different opinions, so ensure you share yours - have a point of view, maybe debate a little and we will respect that.

 

Always open to great people. We are always hiring and happy to chat even if the timing isn’t quite right. That’s why you might see this job post open for a long time. We are not collecting resumes or doing stealth market research, we just believe in the power of serendipity. To make that more transparent - right now we have a clear need for 1 Engineering Manager in the team, but this is likely to grow in 2027.

Recruiter quick chat. Our recruiter will check you are human, can communicate effectively and cover some of the basics like compensation, benefits and availability.

 

Expertise. This will be with Sean, our Senior Engineering Manager. You’ll work through a real problem together that Sean’s faced in the past, and explore the different opportunities, decisions and tradeoffs you might encounter. He’ll be wanting to understand how you think about managing and growing people and get a sense of how you might work together.

 

Role chat. This will be with me. I’ll be wanting to understand how you think and approach the role and engineering excellence. I’ll start by asking you the question you include in your application. And I’ll want to dig into your answers so that this becomes more of a conversation and shared exploration than a Q&A session 😃.

 

Meet the team. This will be with members of the Product and Tech team - a PM or Designer and one or two Product Engineers - and it’s your chance to ask questions and build a picture of what it’s like to work at Zen. We’ll ask you to formulate these questions in advance and share them with us, to make the most of the time together.

 

Once interviewers have shared their feedback from each session we do an internal debrief - that’s where we discuss what we are excited about you for in the role, any challenges we see and whether we think we can mitigate them at this time. From there we will make a decision and either proceed to offer or tell you that we’re not offering.

 

We believe feedback is important, but also know not everyone wants it - so we don’t share it by default. If you’d like feedback after the process, just let us know. Note that we’ll frame the feedback from our perspective of why we did or did not have the confidence rather than as a commentary on you.

If you read all of the above and are excited (maybe even a little nervous) about the opportunity and how we work then I recommend applying now! If you skipped or skimmed the above, feel free to apply anyway but you’re missing a bunch of useful information that could streamline the process for you 😉