Engineering Manager, Backend at Homer (New York, NY)

HOMER has a newly created opportunity for an Engineering Manager, Backend to join our growing team!  This role will report into our New York City. 

HOMER, a BEGiN brand, is the proven early learning program that provides the best educational start possible. We offer personalized, fun, and proven learning products for kids ages 2-8 to help build confidence, mastery, and a love of learning. We are deeply committed to our members and to their children, and we are building a creative and strategic team to develop a portfolio of early learning products that support learning everywhere.

Reporting to our Sr Director, Technology, the Engineering Manager, Backend will be responsible for managing and leading a growing team of backend engineers (currently 3). You will own all  user and subscriber systems and their integrations to all third party systems we use.

You are a maker at heart and have experience in finding a balance between individual technical contribution and achieving results via your team.  You will focus on elegant and effective technical solutions that enable Homer’s vision described above. In the future, you will participate in growing our technology platform to support the needs of rapidly growing user-base. 

Above all, you care about delivering quality software, that delights our users, in a sustainable and timely manner. You have experience in, and passion for, building and running effective teams that deliver and thrive.

You will:

• Own all user and subscriber systems that power our apps, websites etc and be accountable for achieving and maintaining a 99.99% uptime for all systems under your charge


• Hire, engage and develop members of your team, distributed in several time zones, of your team. Occasionally help with hiring on adjacent ones


• Make direct technical contributions (writing, debugging, reviewing and deploying code)


• Contribute to technical design and architecture of applications, and participate in larger system design efforts.

Must Haves:

• At least 3 years of technical and organizational leadership experience with a track record of successfully growing, motivating, developing and managing an engineering team


• Demonstrable expertise designing and building applications, microservices and other systems using Javascript,Typescript and Node.


• Sound Computer Science fundamentals (Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field preferred).


• Experience with deployment technologies in a cloud hosted environments like AWS.


• At least 5 years of relevant work experience with sound Computer Science fundamentals (Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field preferred).


• Strong interpersonal and communication skills.

Nice-to-Haves:

• Experience working with offshore or distributed teams, and familiarity using communication tools like Slack.


• Understanding of SDLC and Agile methodology (plus) and experience using JIRA and git SCM


• Knowledge of full stack engineering, especially how scalable frontend and backend systems interoperate.


• Experience in using GraphQL effectively.

We like people who:

• Collaborate effectively with stakeholders and other team members (product managers, UI/UX designers, engineers, data scientists and others) to define and refine requirements and then execute on them.


• Have an entrepreneurial mindset and know how to balance speed to market and elegance in technical design.


• Are passionate about and thrive in a culture of learning and teaching. You love challenging yourself to constantly improve, and sharing your knowledge to empower others.


• Care about solving big, systemic problems. You look beyond the surface to understand root causes so that you can build a complete and long-term solution for the whole ecosystem.


• Want to be part of an organization with a transparent and agile environment where you can communicate freely and openly.

What you’ll get:

• HOMER offers competitive compensation including equity and full benefits.


• Smart, passionate, and engaged co-workers.


• Excellent top-tier Medical/Dental/Vision benefits.


• The chance to have a big impact, quickly.


• Help bring a love of reading and learning to children globally!

HOMER is an equal opportunity employer and enthusiastically encourages people from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences to apply. HOMER does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), gender, national origin, citizenship, age, mental or physical disability, veteran status, marital status, sexual orientation or any other basis prohibited by law.

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