{"id":4283817,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zen-educate-engineering-manager-remote-us-ctet","title":"Engineering Manager (Remote - US CT/ET)","company":{"id":51639,"name":"Zen Educate","domain":"zeneducate.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/zen-educate","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"staffing","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":89,"open_postings":12,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.25,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":94,"computed_at":"2026-11-12T10:38:37Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":{"label":"ET","utc_offset_min":-5,"utc_offset_max":-5},"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Chicago, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":190000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":190000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Slack","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-13T18:14:16Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-13","last_verified_at":"2026-11-13T21:11:45Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"High-level stuff you might be filtering against\nLocation: Remote (CT/ET Timezone). Collaborating with teams on the West Coast and in Europe.\nType: Full-time\nSalary: Location dependent. As a guide, our current range across all levels is $160k-$190k. We are open to negotiation as we recognise there are different situations, but these are our general guardrails.\nWhat I am looking for\nHi, I’m Martin, Chief Technology Officer at Zen Educate and I’m looking for an Engineering Manager who can make an impact on the real-world problem of education staffing, and do it by leading a team in engineering excellence.\nEvery place has its own understanding of what engineering excellence looks like (sometimes written down, sometimes not). Here’s what it means to me and Zen:\nValuing real-world outcomes and shared learning over output\nProduct thinking over pure tech - start with the problem, ship quickly and iterate.\nTeam success and sustainability over individual heroics.\nWe are a small, but mighty team and so every person has the opportunity to make an outsized impact and put their stamp on what excellence looks like in practice. What do I mean by “small”? Today we have 21 Product Engineers, all reporting to one Senior Engineering Manager, working in small, dynamic teams across the Zen product.\nWe recognise the world is not static - “what got us here, won’t get us there” - so we look for curiosity, adaptability and proactiveness as fundamental traits. The leaders I see being most successful in Product and Tech are those who focus on identifying and solving problems, and then use technology to turn those solutions into scalable systems. We’re aiming for ‘antigravity’ - using automation to get faster and multiply impact as we scale.\nThis role is particularly exciting because you’ll be Zen’s first Engineering Manager in the US, where we’re enjoying rapid growth. You’ll thrive in this role if you’re someone who can build relationships quickly, take strong ownership of problems end-to-end and hire and grow a team around you\nWhat we are building and why\nGetting the right teacher into the right school at the right time is a crucial problem to solve, both for education outcomes for children and for the sustainability of an industry that spends billions on this.\nToday the platform we are building supports internal operations teams on filling roles, educators on finding roles via our mobile app and schools on getting educators in for both short-term and long-term roles. The more we develop the platform (and the ability to self-serve in the marketplace), the more efficient the whole process becomes, which means more money going back to educators and into classrooms (over $65 million globally since 2017).\nWe are well established in the UK and growing at a phenomenal rate in the US\nWhat we need now is to reach the next level in how we scale the engineering team to support this growth. That’s where you come in\nWhat the role looks like in practice\nI’ve written a bunch of words above that I hope capture your interest and excitement . But what really matters is what reality looks like and the best person to share that is the person already doing the job. So here’s a glimpse of work over the last few weeks from Sean, our Senior Engineering Manager:\n“I’ve been building a system to automate the admin of managing lots of engineers, so I can focus on the fun, human parts of my role - great conversations with great people! Those have included 1:1s with Product Engineers exploring when work flows well for them and how to make that happen more often, interviewing Mission Leads to gather feedback ahead of our upcoming performance cycle, and working with our People Lead to navigate a tricky situation and manage the impact on my team.\nI’ve been partnering with the CTO to develop our compensation and levelling philosophy. Following our last pay review cycle some of our engineers were promoted up a level, and so Martin and I spent a day celebrating them in the Product and Tech Slack channel, with messages for each individual calling out the impact they’ve had in the last six months - a real privilege!\nI’ve also organised time for the team to come together: a ‘How I Work’ session where engineers shared their cool AI-powered workflows, a training session on running an excellent demo, and a social to celebrate a departing team member. With the team growing, I’ve been hiring manager for 5 new Product Engineers and I’ve helped train members of the team to run our tech loops. And I’ve just shipped a small bugfix, to keep my hand in!”\nThe Engineering Manager role comes in many different shapes and sizes. At Zen, your primary focus will be people. You’ll be managing a large group of Product Engineers, but this isn’t a ‘people lead’ or ‘department head’ role: you’ll need to be close enough to your engineers and their work to help them grow, using tried-and-tested habits like excellent 1:1s and feedback to make this happen. In the background, you’ll spend time creating systems to automate processes, so you can invest your time in building relationships and increasing talent density in the team. As an Engineering Manager you can expect to be close to both the CTO and the CPO and their teams, and you’ll have the opportunity for huge influence and impact in Product and Tech.\nWhat you might like or dislike\nEvery place makes tradeoffs based on what they value and where they are in their journey . Here’s a list of things you might find useful in figuring out if this is the right role for you. If we end up chatting, feel free to dig deeper into any of them. Note that some of these are recent changes in our approach and may be “work in progress” when you join.\nHow We Work\nMissions, not org charts. Teams form around outcomes, not reporting lines, and process exists only where it serves performance. Your reports will be spread across several Missions at once, so you manage people and their growth, not a team or a backlog.\nWide scope and real leverage. Engineering Managers at Zen manage a large group of Product Engineers (typically 10-15 individuals). We’re growing fast, and you’ll be a Hiring Manager from early on, running interviews, debriefs and offers with our talent team. You’ll succeed through coaching, feedback and building relationships - always thinking about how to increase the talent density in the team. You won’t necessarily be the best engineer in the room, but you will contribute to technical conversations and decision making, and there will always be opportunities to ship a small improvement or bugfix!\nHigh expectations and strong investment. Every engineer here has their own specific strengths and their own route to impact. You’ll help each person identify and build on what we often call their spikiness - those skills and behaviours they can leverage to do something special. You’ll do this through conversations and feedback, and through celebrating the work they do. At Zen we don’t have competency grids or performance frameworks: instead we focus on recognising examples of excellence - the real impact people have - which will look different for each person at each level. This means we also spot early when something isn’t working and have the honest conversations that follow. Sometimes that leads to hard decisions, and we’ll work through those together.\nExperimenting to unlock new opportunities, tried-and-tested for the rest. There are lots of exciting ways to leverage systems and automation to increase the impact of a single manager across a large team. You’ll constantly be experimenting with AI and tooling to take on the admin and add value, but you’ll lean on proven habits, like great 1:1s and honest feedback, for the parts that benefit most from a human relationship.\nCelebrate often. We make a point of marking wins, learnings and goodbyes, and as an Engineering Manager you’ll be someone people look to as a champion of that. This will mean celebrating when people get promoted to a new level, and giving them a great send-off when they choose to move on to new opportunities. It will also sometimes mean having awkward or challenging 1:1s about performance, and being a stable point as you navigate rapid change with your team.\nGrowth & Progression\nChoose your own career path. We care most about impact and learning and we don’t have rigid competency grids. This means greater flexibility in what progression looks like, but requires you to build an understanding of what we value from guiding principles and shared real-world examples.\nFew titles, infinite Levels. Roles at Zen define your scope, and Levels show your growth within it. As an Engineering Manager, your scope is the group of engineers you lead. Within that there’s no ceiling: you’ll move up Levels as your impact through your team grows, in how they develop, what they deliver, and how sustinable their work is.\nInvestment over reward as a mindset. Level changes are tightly coupled to compensation changes. Confidence in a Level change is based on sustainably doing great work at your current level. We think it is fairer to invest in what you do next, rather than reward you doing the next Level first for free!\nYour manager is a partner, not a supervisor. You'll have a manager, but they won't be directing your every move. Expect them to help you think through hard problems, offer perspective, and provide nudges to help you grow - not to tell you what to do or check your work. That means you'll need to take ownership of your own progress and speak up when you need unblocking. We’ll look to you to be this kind of manager too, and to model these behaviours to others.\nCompensation\nMarket reality. Compensation is based on your competitiveness in your local hiring market (note that’s not just where you live). We don’t believe anyone has found a great solution to global compensation, so we aim instead to be clear and equitable in how we do it.\nSolid, but not flashy compensation. We pay decently, but we won’t beat out companies with deeper pockets (yet!).\nThink long-term investment. If you are in a place where you need to prioritise immediate financial gain then this probably isn’t the right time to join us.\nTeam Culture & Collaboration\nDistributed engineering team. Solid communication skills and async habits are key to being effective. You’ll find strong connection here, but not through engineering getting together in-person. As an Engineering Manager, that means building strong trust and connection with 10-15 people you’ll mostly work with remotely. If you like the buzz of working near others you are welcome to work from one of our offices, but there won’t be many members of the engineering team there on any given day.\nWe believe in impact and measurable outcomes, alongside shared learning. If your work moves the needle or teaches us something meaningful then that’s a win. If not, then we’ll want to understand why.\nBalanced, sustainable work. Long hours are not a badge of honour - they are an indication something isn’t working well. We value a sustainable pace and healthy teams, and as an Engineering Manager you’ll be one of the people making that real.\nDiversity is good in some ways and lacking in others. You might be the first of something here. That matters and we’ll support appropriately if you are.\nHow we hire\nHire fast, fix fast. Hiring today is...not great, with most companies being too cautious and taking too long to make a decision . We move quicker - our ideal is: apply Monday, offer by Friday. Then we invest heavily in the most important part - your onboarding. We ensure you are set up for success, with clear direction, quality time with each of your engineers, and exposure to the Missions they’re working on.\nWhilst fast doesn’t mean frivolous, it does slightly increase the risk that you or we made a mistake. So we include regular check-ins during onboarding to make sure expectations match reality. If either side feels something is off then we try to fix it fast. 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