Engineering Manager

The Role

Swiftly is looking for an Engineering Manager to join a cross-functional product team enabling our transit agency customers to operate and manage on-vehicle hardware systems and devices. Your team’s work spans technology stacks connecting cloud-native services interfacing with Swiftly’s core data engine to a variety of embedded/IoT devices running onboard public transit buses, trains, and ferries.

We seek Engineering Managers who are curious about problems to solve and orient toward impact by being flexible in their specific contributions to help their team succeed. You will be responsible for growing and supporting a high-performing team, ensuring engineers have the context, support, and technical direction they need to do their best work. You will drive delivery of products across the full vertical, from software running on edge devices in the field, the communication layers that connect those devices to the cloud, and backend services that configure, control, and process data from those devices. You should bring deep familiarity with real-time data systems, consumer or commercial devices, and hardware and software integrations — enough to guide architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and engage credibly in technical discussions.

We encourage you to apply if you meet half or more of the requirements and are excited to learn about the rest. Above all else, we value candidates with a growth mindset, the aptitude to learn, and strong motivation to deliver impact to customers. If this is exciting to you, we'd love to talk!

What You'll Do

• Partner with the team's Engineers and Product Manager to understand customer needs, define impactful solutions, set milestones and goals, and deliver valuable products to market
• Contribute to our products hands-on and as a technical mentor/partner
• Guide the team to balance technical excellence with rapid delivery, evolving practices as products scale
• Maintain and improve our physical hardware lab if local to San Francisco, else contribute to solutions for remote development, testing, and debugging needs
• Stay apprised of developments in AI tooling, capturing improvements that drive efficiency and effectiveness of the team as product development evolves
• Proactively seek feedback and share progress, learnings, and blockers to drive alignment cross-functionally
• Help define and refine our onboard architecture and implementation processes, including through observational customer site visits and collaboration with partners
• Manage team members with a focus on enabling a supportive, inclusive, growth-oriented, and outcome-focused culture on the team
• Create an environment where your direct reports are proud to work at Swiftly, as measured by employee retention and employee satisfaction scores

What Will Set You Up for Success

• 3+ years of experience in engineering team leadership and people management, with a track record of developing engineers and building high-performing teams while remaining hands-on with technical contributions
• Proven experience guiding teams toward outcomes and delivering end-to-end products spanning cloud-based SaaS environments and embedded hardware in the field
• Strong ability to support team execution by clarifying goals, breaking down work effectively, and managing competing priorities across multiple product surfaces
• Proficiency with languages and technologies in our stack: Python, Java, Javascript/Typescript, MQTT, SQL databases
• Experience with communication protocols and paradigms of multiple varieties: serial interfaces (RS-232, J1708, CAN), network protocols (HTTP/REST, UDP v. TCP), and messaging patterns (MQTT, pub/sub, store-and-forward)
• Fluency with Linux including imaging, system administration, containerization, process management, networking, and security
• Familiarity with approaches to remote deployment and update mechanisms (eg. OTA updates, A/B partitioning, configuration management, edge container orchestration)
• A testing and quality mindset, with strong opinions on system validation, automated testing, observability, and monitoring
• Experience with cloud-native architectures and services (AWS preferred)
• Comfortable applying modern AI tools and techniques in the software development lifecycle to accelerate development
• You seek and internalize feedback (a core Swiftly value!), are humble in technical debate, and committed to blameless learning and improvement
• You are excited to be part of a mission-driven company improving public transit. Regardless of your why, it is important that you care about the work we do