Manager, Engineering

Manager, Engineering

Denver, Colorado

Who We Are: We're a high-growth software company with a big mission: empowering K-12 district teams to do more with less.

At LINQ, we get K12. That's why we help districts transform K-12 school operations with best-in-class, cloud-based software solutions built to help districts return more resources to classrooms. Integrating finance, HR, nutrition management, and payments into a single, secure platform, LINQ reduces administrative burden. LINQ is trusted by 30% of school districts across the U.S. to help them operate more efficiently and serve over 1 billion meals to 17 million students annually, process payroll for 364,000 educators, administrators, and staff, and engage with millions of families through the free LINQ Connect app.

Our team? They're talented, committed, and fiercely loyal problem-solvers. At LINQ, you'll find challenging and meaningful work, a team that respects and uplifts one another, and a commitment to constant improvement. Our customers love us because we're attentive, patient, communicative, and solutions focused. They know they can count on us to not only anticipate their needs but to deliver the right answer every time.

LINQ's Values:

• Act with Integrity & Build Trust: Trust is the foundation of our company. We operate with the highest standards of integrity, both internally and externally. We believe in transparency, honesty, and accountability. Building a culture where trust is earned and maintained.
• Deliver Excellence: We consistently exceed our clients' expectations. In every interaction, we strive to anticipate needs, provide swift solutions, and go the extra mile to relentlessly impress our customers. We communicate clearly, consistently, and in a timely way to cultivate lasting relationships.
• Embrace Challenges: We embrace a growth mindset. Challenges offer opportunities to learn, grow, and improve. Continuous learning keeps us relevant and effective to ensure our solutions remain on the leading edge of innovation.
• Collaborate & Act as One Team: Diverse skills, ideas, and perspectives are our strength. Through open communication, shared goals, and a spirit of unity and mutual respect, we collaborate to achieve excellence, drive innovation, and propel our company forward as a cohesive force.

About the Team Our engineering teams build the software school districts run on every day. Nutrition management and the cafeteria line, payroll and finance, and the tools families actually log into. The ERP team owns payroll for teachers and school staff across 22 states, so when we get something wrong, people don't get paid on time. That's not a hypothetical stake, it's the one we work under.

We're modernizing a system districts have depended on for years while it keeps running for them, which is the harder version of the problem and a more interesting one. This team knows the domain as well as anyone in the company. As we take on larger districts, the opportunity in front of this role is to build the engineering practice that scales with them: test automation, release confidence, and delivery that holds up as the customer base grows.

You'll manage six full-time engineers directly and lead delivery across our offshore and nearshore pods, 13 people in total.

About the Role We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead one or more engineering teams responsible for delivering high-quality software across LINQ's product platform. You'll partner closely with the Director of Engineering, senior engineers on your team, and Product leadership to ship software where reliability, data accuracy, and operational rigor are non-negotiable. This is a player/coach role that leans coach roughly 80% of your time goes to leading people, with the remainder spent where a manager's technical time pays off most: architecture and design review, high-stakes code review, and pairing on hard problems.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead and grow a team of engineers across a blended FTE and contractor model running meaningful 1:1s, writing growth plans, managing performance honestly, and giving direct, kind, actionable feedback.
• Own delivery outcomes for your team's product area, partnering with Product to shape the work rather than just receive it, and drive predictable, high-quality execution.
• Partner with the Director of Engineering and your engineers to shape and execute the technical roadmap, balancing new product capabilities, infrastructure modernization, and platform reliability.
• Keep operational excellence front and center system reliability, data integrity, and graceful handling of third-party dependencies are baseline expectations, not stretch goals.
• Raise the hiring bar and own the hiring loop for your team: sourcing, interview calibration, and closing talent.
• Contribute as a technical leader in ADRs, design reviews, and high-stakes code reviews, weighing in on tradeoffs with enough depth that your technical voice sharpens the work.
• Drive healthy engineering practices: testing discipline, CI/CD, DORA and flow metrics, and incident response, using evidence to guide improvement rather than opinion alone.
• Enable the team to adopt AI-assisted development tooling effectively and responsibly, modeling the practices yourself.
• Cultivate a culture where engineers are confident to change code, and communicate clearly in writing up, across, and down on roadmaps, status, risks, tradeoffs, and decisions.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years managing software engineering teams, with a track record of shipping production software at quality.
• Experience managing mixed FTE and contractor teams, with a clear sense of where those management approaches converge and diverge.
• Strong technical background in.NET, C#, and modern ASP.NET service development able to contribute credibly in design and code reviews.
• Comfortable working in an established codebase that includes legacy VB alongside modern C#, and pragmatic about modernizing it incrementally.
• Working familiarity with Angular, enough to review front-end work and reason about full-stack tradeoffs.
• Experience building observability into how a team operates logging, monitoring, and alerting that catch issues before a customer reports them.
• Evidence-based management approach, familiar with DORA, SPACE, or equivalent frameworks.
• Production experience in AWS environments, comfortable reasoning about container-based deployment (ECS/EKS), serverless services, and managed databases.
• Experience leading teams through infrastructure modernization without disrupting delivery.
• Hands-on user of Claude Code, Cursor, or similar AI-assisted coding environments, able to coach a team on effective, responsible use of AI tooling.
• Coaching-first instinct, direct communication style, and fluency in Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD practices.

What Will Make You Stand Out

• Experience in K-12 EdTech, SaaS, or other mission-driven software environments.
• Background managing teams that operate high-reliability, high-transaction-volume systems.
• Experience running blended onshore/offshore or FTE/contractor engineering teams at scale.
• Experience splitting or merging teams as organizational scope evolves.
• Contributions to engineering excellence programs, management communities of practice, or internal leadership development.

Education

Bachelor's degree in any field, or equivalent practical experience. Domain expertise and demonstrated craft carry more weight than academic background.

Travel Requirements

Less than 10%

Compensation

We offer a competitive salary of $130,000-$150,000 + a 8% annual bonus.

Why You'll Love Working With Us

Planning Your Future: Our 401(k) plan comes with a 4% employer match on total earnings (not just your base salary).

Performance Pays Off: Whether it's a company bonus or target sales commission, your hard work doesn't go unnoticed.

Vacation Your Way: Our flexible Open Paid Time Off Plan lets you take the time you need, when you need it.

Paid Parental Leave: Take the time you need to welcome your new addition We've got you covered!

Ten Paid Corporate Holidays: Enjoy a