{"id":970940,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kira-learning-engineering-manager","title":"Engineering Manager","company":{"id":689795,"name":"Kira Learning","domain":"kira-learning.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/kira-learning","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":215000,"max":260000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":260000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Kotlin","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-16T17:03:01Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-16","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T06:44:01Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":48,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":48},"description":"We live in a world where technology is rapidly changing the educational experiences of students and teachers everywhere, and we have the opportunity to shape how this change takes place. Kira's mission is to harness transformative AI technologies to make world-class personalized teaching and learning accessible to everyone. We are a rapidly growing startup backed by top-tier Venture Capital funds including New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Andrew Ng's AI Fund, and Primavera.\nAs an Engineering Manager, you will lead a team responsible for significant product and platform capabilities. You are accountable for the people on your team, the technical quality and reliability of what they build, and whether the work reaches useful outcomes for real classrooms.\nThis is a deeply technical management role. We expect Engineering Managers to have the judgment of a strong senior or staff-level engineer: able to challenge system designs, review consequential code, debug production issues, reason about performance and failure modes, and coach engineers from concrete experience. You should still write code when it is the highest-leverage thing to do, but your success is measured by the capability and output of your team, not your personal commits.\nYou will work closely with Product, Design, QA, and engineering leaders to turn ambiguous goals into clear problems, pragmatic plans, and reliable software. Kira’s environment includes a large monorepo spanning frontend, backend, AI services, and real-time collaboration; multiple platform generations; complex education workflows; and teams distributed across the US and APAC. Ramping takes time, and we plan accordingly. This role requires flexibility with work hours and occasional availability outside regular business hours, and is based in San Francisco or New York City, working from the office four days per week (Wednesdays WFH).\nWhat You'll Do\nTurn company priorities into clear problems, ownership, and honest milestones; find the critical path, surface risk early, test assumptions, and cut scope intelligently.\n\nStay close enough to the architecture, codebase, and production systems to evaluate technical decisions independently; review consequential work and coach engineers on system design, data modeling, debugging, performance, reliability, code quality, and security.\n\nGive people meaningful ownership, coach them through increasing ambiguity, and develop senior engineers and technical leads by delegating consequential decisions.\n\nSet expectations early, give feedback in the moment, recognize strong performance, and address gaps before review time.\n\nEnsure the team designs for realistic failure modes and peak load, operates what it ships, responds effectively to incidents, and turns failures into durable improvements.\n\nPartner closely with Product and Design - help define the problem instead of accepting requirements, and make sure what ships works in real classrooms, not just in demos.\n\nEstablish clear ownership and decision rights; invite disagreement, challenge weak reasoning, resolve conflict, and make important decisions and their rationale clear.\n\nMaintain a high hiring bar based on demonstrated judgment and outcomes, not pedigree or output volume; onboard people thoughtfully and contribute credible signal to leveling and calibration.\n\nBe fluent with modern AI development tools and help the team use them well across planning, implementation, testing, debugging, and review - while maintaining independent engineering judgment and watching for review-cost transfer such as sloppy AI-generated code.\n\nCommunicate clearly across functions and time zones, writing concisely and creating enough shared context that teams can operate without constant synchronous coordination.\n\nWhat We're Looking For\nBachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience.\n\n8+ years professional engineering experience, including designing, shipping, and operating consequential production systems.\n\n2+ years managing mid, senior and lead level software engineers\n\nTechnical depth comparable to a strong Senior or Staff+ Software Engineer, with recent hands-on experience to review substantive changes, investigate production behavior, and write targeted code when useful.\n\nStrong system design and debugging skills across architecture, APIs, data models, distributed systems, performance, and failure modes.\n\nA track record of developing engineers into more independent owners, including senior engineers or technical leads.\n\nExperience giving difficult feedback, managing underperformance, recognizing strong performance, and running substantive career conversations.\n\nStrong execution judgment - framing ambiguous problems, sequencing work, managing dependencies, reducing scope intelligently, and operating without heavy process.\n\nExperience owning production reliability and incident response, including systemic follow-through.\n\nStrong product judgment and experience shaping scope with Product and Design.\n\nHigh familiarity with AI-assisted software development and a clear view of both its leverage and failure modes.\n\nClear written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical audiences.\n\nA low-ego leadership style with a strong sense of responsibility for the quality of the team's work.\n\nPreferred:\nKotlin, Python, React, TypeScript, MySQL, and AWS\n\nOperating high-traffic applications and diagnosing application, database, or infrastructure bottlenecks under production load.\n\nManaging full-stack teams while maintaining strong backend or systems depth.\n\nLLM-backed product capabilities, including evaluation, observability, latency, cost, and failure handling.\n\nLeading teams across regions and time zones.\n\nEducation technology or another environment where reliability and usability directly affect large numbers of users.\n\nWhat We Offer\nCompetitive compensation and equity. Salary range for this role is $215K-$260K+ depending on relevant experience and skill set.\n\nMedical, dental, vision and life insurance, including a medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee premiums.\n\nFlexible PTO policy and company holidays.\n\nDoorDash credit for lunch daily.\n\nWellhub Membership: 100% company-paid access to premium gym networks (Orangetheory, SoulCycle), 60+ wellness apps (Headspace, MyFitnessPal, Apple Fitness+), and 1:1 coaching sessions spanning fitness, mental health, nutrition, and sleep.\n\nDog friendly office .\n\nEqual Opportunity Employer\nKira believes that diversity and inclusion among our employees are critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. Selection for employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.\nAt Kira, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law.\nBackground Check\nKira will make a conditional job offer in line with local, state and federal laws, and a subsequent criminal, education, and employment history background check will then be issued","description_format":"text","description_chars":7522,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Health insurance","Life insurance","Pet friendly"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["EdTech Platforms","Education AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-16T17:49:49Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 1","filings_12m":1,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":162500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":26,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.57,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":48,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:4","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":260000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kira-learning-engineering-manager","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kira-learning-engineering-manager.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-04T07:31:26Z","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":11726,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-05T00:00:00Z"}},"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":689795},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=689795"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fkira-learning-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%2Fkira-learning-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%2Fkira-learning-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/kira-learning-engineering-manager\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fkira-learning-engineering-manager"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":970940}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"kira-learning.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":970940},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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