Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager

New York, New York, United States

Who We Are

The Farmer's Dog was born from a mission to change the landscape of pet health, providing dogs and their humans with honest, smart, and simple care. We're starting by radically improving the $90 billion pet food industry, replacing bags of highly-processed pellets with a personalized subscription service that sends complete and balanced, freshly-made dog food directly to customers' doors. Our ultimate goal is to create innovative, delightful and personalized experiences across all aspects of pet care, and we believe our direct-to-consumer business model, holistic approach to growth, and dynamic culture uniquely position us to shepherd this backwards industry into the future. To date, The Farmer's Dog has delivered over 1 billion meals nationwide and raised over $150M in funding to help us build a company as healthy as the dogs who are eating those meals. Join us as we continue to develop ways of bringing peace of mind to customers, health to their companions, and much-needed change to the way people feed and care for their pets.

#LongLiveDogs

What We Stand For and Where You'll Come In

Our engineering org is growing, creating fresh opportunities to solve complex, high-impact problems at scale. This role is part of that growth: a chance to shape how we build, collaborate, and lead as we take on bigger challenges.

As an Engineering Manager, you'll lead a team (we call them pods) of engineers focused on delivering impactful software and growing as individuals. Your role is to ensure both the short and long term success of the pod: finding a balance of delivering impactful projects for the business, continuously improving team cohesion and processes, and supporting individuals progress through their careers. You'll embody our values and working principles, leading by example and instilling them in your pod. You'll co-own your pod's roadmap in deep partnership with Product Managers and Product Designers while collaborating cross-functionally to ensure we're solving the right problems at the right depth.

We work with a modern tech stack, including TypeScript (end-to-end), React, GraphQL, Postgres, AWS, Docker, and Temporal, and are looking for engineers excited to dive into these technologies and help us push them further.

One Team: We don't think of ourselves as "Acquisition Marketers", "Engineers", "Data Analysts", or "Product Managers". Beyond denoting skill sets and areas of expertise, we don't think departments matter. We'd rather align ourselves to the goals we're working to achieve and make sure we have necessary subject matter expertise to drive meaningful impact. We strive to orient ourselves around customer problems TOGETHER getting the right people, with the right context, in the right rooms/Zooms to solve problems holistically.

We are skeptical about everything and precious about nothing: Ideas can and should come from anywhere, and we aren't tied to our own. We proactively source input. We talk to our customers and leads regularly and are quick to change course if we know there's a better or more impactful way to solve problems.

We consider the customer journey in all of our decisions: We know that no interaction exists in a silo and therefore understand how important every single one is. We ensure our strategy sets prospective and new customers up for success and drives long-term retention. We answer questions and address problems early and proactively. We understand the value of different channels, initiatives, and messages and know how to articulate impact and advocate for prioritization holistically.

We Execute For Impact: We don't subscribe to "best practices" or "industry KPIs". We're uninterested in how we compare to "benchmarks"; instead we orient ourselves around being the best we can possibly be. Similarly, we don't subscribe to rigid or classical expectations of roles i.e. acquisition is hyper-focused on improving customer retention and experience.

We Are Focused and Work Without Assumption: We are not beholden to ideas. We have goals and believe everything beyond that is a series of hypotheses to validate. To that end, we seek to work in sequence and not in parallel. We constantly ask ourselves, "what's the most important hypothesis I should be working on right now? How do I confirm or reject that hypothesis as fast as possible?". We rarely have timelines/deadlines and are constantly taking in new information and adjusting our priorities accordingly. We don't expect to be perfect the first time.

How You'll Make An Impact

• Grow and support a pod of 4+ engineers through thoughtful hiring, onboarding, coaching, and continuous feedback.
• Create an environment of high trust, ownership, and clarity where engineers are proud of their work and aligned on priorities.
• Lead your pod's technical direction, ensuring scalable systems, clean architecture, and strong engineering craft in collaboration with Staff Engineers and other Engineering leadership.
• Partner closely with Product Managers to shape strategy and roadmaps, adapt priorities, and deliver meaningful outcomes.
• Promote a culture of continuous improvement through architecture reviews, incident reviews, and peer mentorship.
• Continuously think about the customer, ensuring your pod's work aligns with company goals and business impact.
• Contribute to the evolution of our engineering organization by improving how we hire, build, and collaborate across pods.
• Operate with urgency and intentionality by moving quickly and focusing on the right problems while improving how we work.
• Look for ways to continuously improve processes, finding ways to leverage technology, enabling the effective and appropriate usage of AI to thoughtfully & strategically optimize the work.

We're Excited About You Because

• You have 5+ years of software engineering experience (full stack and top of funnel experience is a plus!).
• You have 3+ years of engineering management experience leading a high-performing team, supporting day-to-day execution, setting goals, and coaching for growth and development.
• You have experience efficiently delegating group responsibilities, conducting 1:1's, managing performance and providing frequent, clear, relevant feedback.
• You lead with curiosity and ownership to remove blockers, drive clarity, and make sure your pod and product succeed.
• You have proven ability architecting for high-scalability and availability.
• You have a customer-centric mentality and experience collaborating with product, design, data, and other key stakeholders.
• You are able to thrive in a fast-paced and ambiguous environment, naturally curious and proactive self-starter, constantly on the lookout for new opportunities and solutions.
• You're a skilled communicator and have the ability to absorb and distill complexity into simple terms to drive decision making.
• You love dogs.

Office Guidelines

We are an in-office culture, made of in-office people who thrive on the collaboration and magnetism of working in a shared space. We are seeking individuals who excel in this type of environment, where being present fosters deeper connections and engagement. We ask all team members to be in office 4 - 5 days a week to build a collaborative and invested environment to foster our unique in-person culture we are proud to have. This office policy is subject to change at company discretion.

Our Belonging Philosophy

At TFD, we believe Belonging is a shared commitment to creating a workplace where every person feels respected, valued, and empowered to be themselves. When people feel a true sense of belonging, they do their best work, take smart risks, and bring forward diverse perspectives leading to stronger decisions and deeper relationships. We anchor this belief in a simple phrase: "Everyone's welcome at the dog park." No matter your background, identity, or role, there's space for you here. There's no one way to show up at the dog park just shared space, mutual respect, and the freedom to be yourself. Being included is just the beginning, it's about contributing your voice, growing through challenges, and building trust through shared goals. This philosophy guides how we lead, how we hire, how we communicate, and how we grow. We continuously evaluate to ensure we are creating a consistent experience that cultivates belonging for all employees, from hiring and performance reviews to talent development. We also believe Belonging happens in everyday moments of connection; lunch with a new teammate, a shared laugh, or a quick story about your weekend. Our structure includes biannual employee surveys, manager training, TFD camps, and support from Humans to ensure we're listening and learning from our Team.

Together, these efforts reflect what Belonging means at TFD: a culture where everyone can thrive.

A Few of Our Best Benefits

• Dog-friendly office in SoHo
• Market-competitive compensation and equity packages
• Comprehen