{"id":952537,"url":"https://alion.io/job/benepass-engineering-manager","title":"Engineering Manager","company":{"id":7574,"name":"Benepass","domain":"getbenepass.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/benepass","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":200000,"max":230000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":230000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Django","optional":false},{"name":"Django REST Framework","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"Copilot","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-15T21:36:36Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T12:44:19Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":30,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":30},"description":"About Us\nAt Benepass we're making benefits easy. We believe people are the most important asset to any company. Traditional one-size-fits-all benefits packages no longer cut it in today's hybrid and remote-first environment. With Benepass, companies can tailor their benefits to the unique needs of their workforce.\nThrough our easy-to-use and highly customizable fintech platform, People teams can implement, administer, and track the benefits that meet employees where they are. Employers design their benefits and perks plan by setting a contribution amount and eligible spend categories. Every employee has their own individual definition of wellness and needs different things to help them be their most productive, fulfilled self.\nOur Mission\nHelping companies reimagine how companies take care of their people.\nOur Investors\nWe are backed by leading investors, including Centana Growth Partners, Portage Ventures, Threshold Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Workday Ventures, and Clocktower Technology Ventures. To date, the company has raised approximately $75 million in equity capital.\nArticles\nFounder Story - Jaclyn Chen\n\nBenepass Raises $40M Series B\n\nCandidate Resources\nBenepass | Candidate Resource Page\n\nBenepass Listed on Inc. Magazine's Best Workplaces of 2023\n\nTEAM & ROLE\nAs an Engineering Manager (M3) at Benepass, you will lead a team of backend engineers on Core Services - the systems that sit on our critical path: the ledger, decisioning, schedules, rules engine, HRIS integrations, authentication, and directory. These are the brains and books of the platform. Every swipe, payout, credit, and adjustment flows through them.\nYou will report to the Vice President of Engineering and split Core Services with a peer Engineering Manager. This is how we scale leadership without turning one manager into a bottleneck. You will own people, execution, and outcomes for your slice of the team. Engineers stay anchored to Core Services for growth and accountability; they ship through time-boxed projects with Product, Design, and Frontend Engineering.\nThis is a hands-on EM role. You have a strong technical background, stay close enough to the systems to review designs, spike prototypes, and debug when it matters, and you do not try to be the best IC in the room. You create the environment - clarity, staffing, and culture - so ICs can own architecture and delivery. Managers own team execution. Project leads own project outcomes. Engineers own the quality and impact of their work.\nThis role is a culture-carrier for how Engineering works. We hire managers who already operate this way - not people we have to convince.\nHOW WE WORK\nOur Engineering Operating Principles are the job, not a poster:\nOwn Outcomes. Accountable for results, not activity. Ownership does not end when code is merged, a ticket is closed, or a project is handed off. Managers own team execution. Project leads own project outcomes. Engineers own the quality and impact of their work. The business experiences outcomes, not tickets.\n\nProjects Are How Work Gets Done. Clear goal, owner, deadline, and definition of success. Teams form around projects, execute, and move on. Core Services also carries operational load - production health, incidents, correctness. We plan for that instead of pretending every hour is roadmap.\n\nOne Roadmap. Sales, Ops, Product, Security, and Data all have real priorities. A priority only matters if we are willing to choose it over something else. If everything is important, nothing is.\n\nHigh Trust, High Accountability. People decide and move without asking permission at every step. Mistakes get surfaced quickly, learned from, and fixed. We do not hide problems, shift blame, or wait for someone else to own it. Weak accountability produces process; we would rather trust people.\n\nMove Fast Through Simplicity. Complexity is expensive. Question meetings, approvals, handoffs, and tools. Prefer principles over rules and judgment over bureaucracy. Ambiguity is a tradeoff we accept for speed.\n\nWork in the Open. Share context early. Document decisions. Surface risks while they are cheap to change. Communication is everyone’s job.\n\nBe AI-Native. AI is a force multiplier and part of the craft. We expect you to use it heavily yourself - not as a talking point, and not only as something you encourage the team to try. People own outcomes. AI expands capacity.\n\nDeliver What We Commit To. Deadlines matter. If a timeline becomes unrealistic, we raise it, cut scope, and make the tradeoff explicit. We do not quietly slip. Reliability builds trust.\n\nROLE LOCATION & TRAVEL\nYou will be expected to attend company-wide on-site events three times per year.\nOUR TECHNOLOGY AND STACK\nPython, Django, Django Rest Framework, PostgreSQL, AWS, Docker - plus the adjacent client surfaces (React / TypeScript) your APIs power.\nWHAT YOU'LL DO\nLead people and raise the bar\nManage ~4-6 engineers to start, with room to hire as we grow.\n\nRun 1:1s that are about growth, not status. Set expectations against our IC leveling matrix. Give feedback early, including the hard kind.\n\nHire, onboard, and level the team. Design a hiring bar you would be proud to join.\n\nCoach project leads. They drive kickoff, technical approach, weekly updates, and release - you make sure they have the support and air cover to do it well.\n\nOwn team execution and outcomes\nBe accountable for results, not activity. Stay engaged until the problem is solved, not when the ticket closes.\n\nTranslate company priorities into a sequenced plan the rest of the company can plan around. If a timeline becomes unrealistic, raise it, cut scope, and make the tradeoff explicit - do not quietly slip it.\n\nProtect operational load. Core Services carries production health, incidents, and correctness work that is not always a roadmap project. Plan for that instead of pretending every hour is feature work.\n\nIncidents take priority over roadmap. Escalate risks early.\n\nStay technically credible on critical-path systems\nLead design reviews. Champion simple, correct, observable patterns. Leave systems better than you found them.\n\nJump into code, prototypes, or production debugging when it unblocks the team or validates a hard tradeoff - then step back.\n\nHold the line on invariants that matter for money and eligibility: idempotency, auditability, reconciliation, and safe retries. Prefer a useful v1 over a perfect design debate.\n\nPartner with Client Apps, Platform, Customer Engineering, Product, and Ops so Core Services is easy to build on - not a bottleneck wrapped in tribal knowledge.\n\nWork in the open\nShare context early. Document decisions. Surface risks before they become problems. Ask for feedback while the work is still easy to change.\n\nProject teams are empowered to decide and expected to drive. Ownership includes gathering context, making tradeoffs, and unblocking yourself when you can.\n\nBe AI-native - starting with you\nThis is not a “nice to have” and it is not a mandate you pass down while you keep working the old way. We want a manager who already heavily leverages AI in their own work, every week, across the job - coding, debugging, design, planning, writing, analysis, 1:1 prep, hiring, and communication.\nAcross Engineering, most new code is already written with AI in the loop. That is the baseline, not a future state. The managers who succeed here treat that as leverage: they get to higher-quality judgment faster, they automate the repetitive parts of the job, and they raise the team’s standard instead of lowering it.\nWhat that looks like in practice:\nYou use it yourself, daily. You have a real workflow - not “we bought Copilot.” You can walk through how you actually design, debug, write, and review with AI. You have changed how you work, not bolted a chatbot onto old habits.\n\nYou hold the same bar. AI-assisted work is held to the same standard of correctness, security, and craft as everything else. On Core Services that is non-negotiable: ledger, decisioning, and money-movement mistakes are real. You review output. You do not outsource judgment. People own outcomes; AI does not.\n\nYou increase leverage, not ceremony. You look for work to automate: tests, runbooks, design-doc first drafts, incident timelines, onboarding, repetitive ops. You kill toil. You do not add an “AI process.”\n\nYou coach the team in the craft. Learning to work effectively with AI is now part of engineering. You set the expectation, share what works, and help people who are behind catch up - without turning it into theater or a purity test for one vendor.\n\nYou are curious and unsentimental. Tools change. You evaluate new ones the same way you evaluate anything else: does this make us more effective? You experiment in the open, keep what compounds, drop what doesn’t.\n\nYou do not hide behind it. AI is not an excuse for sloppy PRs, missing context, or skipped thinking. If the model is wrong, you still own the result.\n\nABOUT YOU\nTechnical Expertise: Deep software engineering experience in Python/Django (or equivalent backend systems) so you can guide architecture, review PRs, and contribute code when it matters. You think in systems, not endpoints.\n\nLeadership & Empathy: Exceptional communicator who builds high trust and high accountability. You create psychological safety, coach engineers toward growth goals, and do not hide problems or wait for someone else to own them.\n\nOutcome-Driven: You own end-to-end results - from sequencing work to production health. The business experiences outcomes, not tickets.\n\nDisciplined Craft: You fight complexity. Clean code, tests, observability, and small building blocks. Principles over rules; judgment over bureaucracy.\n\nAI-Native: You heavily use AI yourself. This is a personal practice, not a talking point. You can show how it has changed your week: how you write and review code, how you debug, how you prepare for 1:1s and design reviews, how you draft and tighten communication. You are not waiting for a platform team to hand you a workflow. You hold AI-assisted work to the same bar as everything else, and you can teach that to a team without turning it into process.\n\nREQUIREMENTS\nExperience: 5+ years of software engineering, including 2+ years leading teams of ~3-8 engineers (or equivalent scope), ideally in a startup or SaaS environment.\n\nTechnical Leadership: Proven ability to lead design reviews, enforce engineering standards, and prototype in Python/Django (or a comparable backend stack). Comfortable on systems where correctness and reliability are not optional.\n\nPeople Development: Experience mentoring engineers through 1:1s, setting growth goals against a leveling matrix, handling performance issues directly, and hiring.\n\nDelivery Excellence: Track record of shipping on commitments, creating clarity from ambiguity, and running a healthy SDLC without turning process into the product.\n\nAI as a personal craft: You already use AI heavily in your own work - coding, debugging, planning, writing, and operating a team. You can describe your workflow in concrete terms. You have used it to increase your (and a team’s) effectiveness, not as a demo. You review and own the output. Candidates who “support AI adoption” but barely use it themselves are not a fit.\n\nBONUS SKILLS\nExperience in fintech, payments, card issuing, wallets, or benefits platforms - especially ledgers, authorization/decisioning, or money movement.\n\nExperience owning high-integrity backend systems (financial, eligibility, identity, or large-scale integrations) where small mistakes have real customer or money impact.\n\nExperience splitting or scaling a team - taking a group that has outgrown one manager and making two healthy teams without creating an A/B split.\n\nProven ability to set and use team KPIs (reliability, cycle time, incident health, delivery against commitments).\n\nExperience evaluating tools (CI/CD, observability) to increase leverage, not ceremony.\n\nStrong background in performance management: promotion cases, PIPs...","description_format":"text","description_chars":13102,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Cards & Card Issuing","Human Resources","Payroll Services","HR & Payroll Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-16T02:05:57Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":67,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.742,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":30,"expected_fill_days":48,"reasons":["conf:2","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":230000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/benepass-engineering-manager","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/benepass-engineering-manager.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T15:48:04Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":26,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":7574},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=7574"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fbenepass-engineering-manager"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fbenepass-engineering-manager"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fbenepass-engineering-manager"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/benepass-engineering-manager\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fbenepass-engineering-manager"}]}