Engineering Manager

Job description

DNSimple is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead our Platform Team. As a key member of our engineering leadership, you will play a critical role in fostering a high-performing engineering culture, supporting the professional growth of team members, and ensuring the successful delivery of projects. The role is fully remote.

Location: worldwide / fully remote

Compensation: 110,000 USD/year to 130,000 USD/year depending on your experience

About the role

As the Platform Team’s Engineering Manager, you will be responsible for ensuring the team’s delivery across all areas of responsibility with the goal of providing reliable systems to our customers and engineering team members.

Together with the team, you will build and sustain an environment where your team members can be their best selves. You will apply your technical knowledge and experience to enrich your team’s capabilities. With a team of five engineers, the job’s focus is on building a cohesive and performant team.

Developing a technical roadmap with the CTO and team is an integral part of increasing application stability while ensuring uninterrupted service to our customers. Working with legacy systems is part of the daily work, as several systems have been under active development for years.

As an engineering leader, you will be a point of contact for your team and across the company. You will participate in product, customer support, and marketing conversations. Clear communication and open collaboration are vital parts of the role.

You Will Be Successful If

• You care about your teammates, treating everyone with respect, fairness, and professionalism.
• You can elevate the team. You understand your team’s strengths and weaknesses, and help them meet the company’s and your standards.
• You can take ownership of projects and lead them to completion while dealing with ambiguity and finding the right balance between speed and quality. You don’t need every detail and edge case spelled out for you, because you can figure out the goals of the project and fill in the blanks.
• You can guide the team to deliver. You help your team ship bug-free changes while making the best possible technical decisions. You find the right balance between speed and quality, and keep everyone focused on the most impactful work.
• You are comfortable with dealing with ambiguity. Not every problem is perfectly defined. You can figure out what matters, bring clarity to your team, and help them ship the right solutions.

What We’re Looking For

• 2+ years of experience leading software engineering teams in a remote or distributed environment.
• Strong background in software engineering, infrastructure management, or SRE.
• Good understanding of cloud infrastructure and distributed systems.
• A keen understanding of developer needs and a passion for building developer-friendly solutions.
• Ability to guide teams in diagnosing and solving complex technical challenges.
• Track record of leading and growing engineering teams.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills with an emphasis on transparency and collaboration.
• Comfortable working in an asynchronous, remote-first environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience with DNS and networking protocols.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automation tools.
• Familiarity with any of the programming languages in use.
• Familiarity with observability, monitoring, and performance optimization of distributed systems.
• Background in security best practices and compliance requirements.
• Open-source contributions or community involvement.

About the Platform Team

The Platform Team is responsible for the core infrastructure that powers DNSimple’s suite of domain management and DNS services. The team operates on two fundamental pillars: maintaining our global DNS infrastructure and enabling other engineering teams to build and deploy products efficiently.

Our infrastructure is built on a technology stack combining Go, Ruby, and Erlang. At the heart of our DNS service is a sophisticated, multi-region anycast network that includes points of presence across America, Europe, and Asia.

A cornerstone of our infrastructure is our open-source, self-developed Erlang-based name server (erldns), which implements state-of-the-art DNS functionality following RFC specifications. The team maintains a comprehensive observability platform to ensure optimal performance and reliability across our entire infrastructure.

Beyond infrastructure management, the Platform Team plays a crucial role in empowering all DNSimple engineers with the tools and systems they need to develop, test, and deploy changes confidently across our infrastructure.

This dual focus on infrastructure reliability and developer enablement ensures that DNSimple can continue to deliver high-quality services to our customers while maintaining rapid product development capabilities.

How we operate

We plan and execute our projects on a Shape Up based product development process. The process helps us focus on the project’s value while providing an approach for shipping high-quality projects on time.

All engineering team members participate in On-Call rotation and dedicate time to customer support, because we want to foster the shared responsibility of operating our systems and helping customers. We believe in the value of regular exposure to those topics.

The team works fully remotely and consists of five members from around the world. We default to asynchronous communication and use synchronous communication when valuable.

Twice a year, the whole company meets somewhere in the world to collaborate and connect.

How to apply

In your cover letter, please tell us why you’re interested in the position and why your experience and expertise would be a good fit for DNSimple.

If, based on your application, we believe you could be a great fit, the the hiring process will follow these steps:

1. Screening call with the VP of Engineering (max. 45 min.)
2. Management focused interview with the VP of Engineering (max. 90 min.)
3. Technical interview with the CTO (max. 90 min.)
4. Conversation with a team member from the Platform team (max. 60 min.)
5. Optionally, you can talk with the CEO if you like
6. Final decision

Please keep in mind that you can be declined from the position at any stage of the process.

We always try to be timely and transparent during the process by providing feedback and sharing our decisions. We look forward to receiving your submission!