Engineering Manager

About Blue J

Location and work arrangement

• The role is primarily remote, but the employee must live within driving distance of the Toronto office.
• In-person attendance is expected for quarterly meetings and occasional team gatherings, typically 1–3 visits per quarter.
• New employees attend three days of onboarding; travel and accommodation are covered for those outside the local commuting area.

The opportunity

Responsibilities

• Set priorities and success measures with Product and Engineering leaders for the AI Content Platform.
• Advance systems for content ingestion, understanding, curation, indexing, and rendering for near-real-time product use.
• Lead design and delivery of foundational systems and internal tools; guide complex decisions and tradeoffs.
• Keep projects on track, communicate with stakeholders, and help teams ship frequently and safely.
• Coach engineers, improve engineering practices and testing, and hire high-performing engineers.
• Clarify ownership, mandates, interfaces, and platform boundaries across pods; work with the pillar Director to surface risks and adjust plans.

What the candidate offers

• 7+ years of hands-on experience designing and building heavily used customer-facing SaaS products.
• 0–2 years of direct management experience, including teams of 4+ engineers; the company seeks someone new to the management role and keen to grow.
• Evidence of shaping innovative products and technical direction in partnership with Product and Design.
• Strong architectural foundation and end-to-end ownership of complex systems, from roadmap and design through implementation and evolution.
• Ability to work as a senior individual contributor when needed, particularly while building context.
• Clear communication of complex system designs to technical and non-technical audiences.

Valuable additional experience

• Large-scale data pipelines, especially in combination with RAG systems.
• Ingestion systems that handle heterogeneous trusted and untrusted data.
• Fault-tolerant, resilient, event-driven distributed systems.
• Cross-functional project management, alignment, and proactive risk communication.

Technologies

• Current technologies include Node.js, React, TypeScript, and Python.
• Infrastructure and delivery technologies include AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, LaunchDarkly, GitHub, and CircleCI.
• Data technologies include PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, S3, Kafka, NATS, and SNS/SQS; the platform stack may evolve.

What Blue J offers

• Leadership role influencing platform foundations, with a culture emphasizing quality, lean iteration, and thoughtful system design.
• Competitive base salary, stock options, and benefits; flexible primarily remote work with occasional Toronto office and conference travel.
• Collaborative and supportive team at a fast-growing, well-funded company.

Compensation

• Base pay is CAD 160,000–195,000 per year; final compensation depends on experience, expertise, and alignment with role responsibilities.
• This is Level 4 in Blue J’s career framework; the top of the range is typically reserved for exceptional depth and high autonomy.