Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. GiveDirectly is a global organization that delivers cash transfers directly to people living in poverty. The Senior Engineering Manager will own a domain of the cash delivery platform, manage a team of senior engineers, and oversee technical outcomes, operational excellence, engineering culture, and cross-functional product development.
Responsibilities
- Directly manage a team growing to 5–7 senior engineers — 1:1s, goal setting, feedback, career development, performance management — and build the team itself: you'll drive recruiting for several of your own hires in your first year and own their onboarding
- Own your domain’s technical outcomes: delivery, reliability, and the consequences of its big technical bets – in close partnership with senior and staff engineers and your product counterpart
- Partner with product to balance feature development with tech debt drawdown, infrastructure investments, and other efforts to improve velocity and drive compounding progress
- Drive operational excellence, including on-call, incident response, code quality, testing, AI, and deployment practices
- Protect and scale the culture as we grow: open debate, product ownership, continuous improvement, and strong engineering foundations
- Represent your team with stakeholders and leadership: translate technical realities into business decisions and vice versa, and partner with diverse stakeholders to create the enabling environment for product development
- Set the technical quality bar: stay close enough to the technical work to weigh in on architecture, review designs, and help the team make sound trade-offs, without becoming the bottleneck
Skills
- **Location: *You must be based in one of the countries on* *[this list](https://perfectwiki.page/p/iOeyfUha_9)* *and must overlap with East Africa Time and US Eastern Time (8am-6pm) by at least 3 hours.***
- ***We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment Visas in the U.S. or U.K. at this time.***
- **Travel Requirement:** Must be able to travel ~3-4 times per year to one of our countries of operation for team retreats or field visits
- * **Exceptional alignment with** [**GiveDirectly Values**](https://www.givedirectly.org/givedirectly-values/) **and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity.**
- **We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.**
- * Language Requirement: English
- * 3+ years managing software engineers through full delivery cycles
- * 8+ years of overall industry experience building production software, with a strong backend foundation (databases, cloud services, APIs)
- * Demonstrated ability to recruit, coach, develop, and retain engineers, building and retaining a talent-dense and inclusive team during periods of high growth
- * Track record of building a strong engineering culture including candid, ego-free debate, deep product ownership, and continuously raising the bar on craft and tooling (including agentic engineering)
- * You enable speed through focus and create clarity in ambiguity: cutting through complexity to the strategic kernel and shielding the team from distraction, so a senior team can move fast and autonomously
- * Strong technical judgment driven by the mission, not ego: you can pressure-test architecture decisions with very senior engineers, have made consequential calls and lived with the results, and weigh technical and non-technical tradeoffs by recipient impact
- * Energized to build product-development fluency in an organization that's relatively new to it: you've successfully partnered with non-technical stakeholders and leaders, and you're excited by this, rather than daunted by it
Benefits
- Unless otherwise noted, the benefits stipend may be used to cover benefits or taken as additional taxable income.
- Bonus at Target Performance: 15% (~$27,170, with potential for upside. For reference, with the organization’s current performance multiplier, this amount would have been ~$31,789 in 2025)
- Annual Benefits Stipend: $21,393
- Bonus at Target Performance:15% (~£18,656, with potential for upside. For reference, with the organization’s current performance multiplier, this amount would have been ~£21,827 in 2025)
- Annual Benefits Stipend:£2,760
- Bonus at Target Performance:15% (~$16,853, with potential for upside. For reference, with the organization’s current performance multiplier, this amount would have been ~$19,717 in 2025)
- Annual Benefits Stipend: $8,453
- This role is fully remote
Company Overview