About the role

WHAT IS LOANCRATE? We started Loancrate to make home-buying simpler and less expensive for lenders and borrowers (us!). Today, mortgage lenders are stuck running their companies on software products built 20 years ago. These products are slow, unstable, and don't lead to material improvements in efficiency. When using these systems, the average human cost to originate a loan is still over $11,000. Loancrate builds AI-native tooling to automate mortgage workflows. Our ultimate goal is fully automated origination, which has the potential to save lenders over $16B in operating expense per year. Since starting in 2020, our remote team has enabled our customers to power >$85 billion in new home loans. We are a group of people excited to tackle the complexity of the home-lending industry. We care about collaboration, very open communication covering the good & the bad so that we learn from our decisions quickly, and ultimately having fun while we're building. You'll fit in well if you like diving deep quickly! THE OPPORTUNITY Our dreams are big and we have much to build! We're looking for an Engineering Manager to own the health, output, and trajectory of one of our engineering pods — roughly 6–8 engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering. You'll own your pod’s operating system: people, execution, delivery health, cross-functional partnership, and continuous improvement. You'll partner with a Technical Lead on architecture and technical quality, and with a Product Manager on what's worth building. Those partnerships are the job. You are not the technical decision-maker of last resort, and you are not a proxy PM — you are the person accountable for whether the pod is healthy and whether the pod delivers. Our product runs some of the most complex, high-stakes workflows in financial services, and when our software is wrong, someone's home purchase is at risk. That reality shapes how we build and how we manage. WHAT TO EXPECT On your first day, you'll ship something to production. It's a team tradition, and for managers it's also a statement of intent. We don't want EMs who lose touch with what their engineers actually do all day. A quick note before diving in: we're building an AI-native product, and we rely on AI heavily in our own engineering workflows too. We use background agents, evals, and AI-assisted development. We expect our managers to be fluent in this, not just tolerant of it. If that excites you, you'll thrive here. If it gives you pause, this probably isn't the right fit. From there, your first 90 days will look something like: First 30 days Weekly 1:1s established with every direct report, and a real read on each person's strengths, motivation, and growth trajectory. A working understanding of the pod's roadmap, codebase, and dependencies. A clear-eyed inventory of what's actually blocking your engineers. First 60 days Your pod’s operating cadence is yours: planning, retros, and follow-through. You're catching stalled or poorly scoped projects before they slip, and you're surfacing risk to the Head of Engineering before it's discovered independently. Your PM has started treating you as a partner in prioritization rather than a recipient of it. First 90 days Performance expectations are explicit and understood. Any sustained performance gap on the pod is being actively addressed. New hires are ramping faster than they were before you arrived. The pod is solving most of its own problems without escalation. CORE RESPONSIBILITIES POD EFFECTIVENESS - Own your pod’s overall performance, and create clarity around priorities, ownership, and expectations. - Own the operating cadence including planning, retros, and follow-through. We’re looking for decision makers instead of status trackers. - Remove what blocks engineers from doing their best work, and keep them on high-leverage problems. - Hold high standards, accountability, autonomy, and psychological safety at the same time. EXECUTION - Be