Senior Engineering Manager, Product

Our Mission and Opportunity

Early education is one of the most important determinants of childhood outcomes, a critical support for working families, and a $175B market that remains underserved by modern technology. Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day. We are a three-time Cloud 100 company, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban.

Our Team

Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. We embody our Leadership Principles in our work and culture. We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally.

Our Mission and Opportunity

Early education is one of the greatest determinants of childhood outcomes, is a must for working families, and has lasting social and economic impact. Brightwheel’s vision is high quality early education for every child. We pursue this by directly supporting teachers in the classroom, engaging parents in the development of their kids, and enabling the small businesses that make up the backbone of the $175 billion early education industry. Brightwheel is the most loved technology brand in early education, trusted by tens of thousands of providers and millions of educators and families.

About the role

Our team is passionate, talented, and deeply customer-focused. We build the platform that thousands of early education programs rely on every day to run their business, serve families, and support children’s growth. As a vertical SaaS company, brightwheel already sits in the middle of the key workflows in early education. We are extending that foundation into a system of action—where software not only records what happened, but also anticipates work, recommends next steps, and takes safe, automated action on behalf of school leaders, teachers, families, and our internal teams.

We’re looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager who combines strong people leadership, technical judgment, and ownership of measurable outcomes. In this role, you will lead a team building customer-facing products that help school leaders, teachers, and families save time, make better decisions, and run stronger programs. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to define what to build, then take it through production, adoption, and measurable customer impact.

What you’ll do

• Lead a full-stack engineering team from problem definition through production, measurement, and iteration.

• Translate company goals into clear outcomes, investment choices, and a credible execution plan.

• Set the engineering strategy for quality, reliability, security, privacy, and operational health.

• Ship AI-powered products and change how the team works with AI—not just add AI features.

• Hire and develop strong engineers, set a clear bar, and act when the team or an individual is below it.

• Make capacity, dependencies, forecasts, and risks visible early.

• Partner early with Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to turn customer problems into shipped product with measurable adoption and impact.

• Own product and platform health across web, mobile, and backend systems, including rollout, reliability, privacy, and support impact.

• Use customer behavior, operational signals, and production data to decide what to build, simplify, or stop.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have led an engineering team that delivered measurable customer or business results.

• Have the technical depth to challenge architecture, product, data, reliability, and operational decisions without taking the work away from the team.

• Have set engineering strategy and made explicit investment and prioritization choices.

• Have shipped an AI-powered product or workflo...