Sr Engineering Manager

About Clair

If you can send your friends money in seconds, why does it still take your employer two weeks to send your paycheck?

At Clair, we are on a mission to create financial freedom for America's workers by giving them a digital banking platform that allows them to get paid as soon as they clock out of work. But we're not just another digital bank or on-demand pay provider. We meet Americans at their place of work by embedding our products within the scheduling, workforce management, and payroll apps they already use every day.

Learn more about us at getclair.com/about

The Role

As our Senior Engineering Manager, you will be the linchpin between rapid execution and sustainable scaling. We are growing quickly, and we need a highly organized, empathetic leader to help us manage "process debt," streamline cross-functional workflows, and build an environment where our engineers can do their best work. You won't just be managing a team; you will be optimizing how we build.

What You’ll Do

• Drive Efficiency: The title line, #1 most important responsibility for a successful Engineering Manager at Clair is overseeing and driving the efficiency and output of the team.
• We want the whole team shipping product at a strong pace, while keeping a slim team as compared to Clair’s ambitions. Even though you’ll have many direct reports, you’ll want to have a strong relationship with the full tech team to drive the output holistically.

Ways you’ll drive the efficiency:

Lead & Mentor:

Directly manage, coach, and grow a team of high-performing engineers. You will conduct impactful 1:1s, guide career development, and ensure your team feels valued and recognized.

Drive Cross-Functional Alignment:

Observe interactions between Engineering, Product, Design, Data, Care, and more, looking for inefficiencies and guiding the teams to be better able to align themselves. You will ensure context is shared transparently and that decisions don't get lost in silos.

Tame the Chaos:

Bring exceptional organizational skills to our engineering operations. You will identify bottlenecks, improve documentation standards (like PRDs), and create clear, lightweight processes that speed us up rather than slow us down.

Protect the Team:

Actively monitor team workloads to ensure we are delivering high-quality work sustainably, guarding against burnout and maintaining healthy boundaries.

Champion Innovation:

Encourage your team to experiment with AI and new tooling to solve complex problems more efficiently. Advocate for time to be invested into Engineer-led initiatives that may not be part of the core product roadmaps.

Bring in Talent:

You’ll be a major part of hiring for the Clair Eng team. Whether finding bright and talented mid-to-senior level developers, or assisting in sourcing and vetting Staff+ level engineers, you will play a critical part in the process. We’re always aiming to level ourselves up, both from a technical perspective as well as cultural.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience: 3–5+ years of direct engineering management experience, ideally leading teams through a period of rapid growth in a series B or C startup.
• Startup DNA: You have thrived in a scaling startup environment. You are comfortable with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and building the airplane while flying it.
• Highly Organized: You are a systems thinker. You naturally look for ways to centralize information, clean up messy workflows, and make executing work easier for everyone around you. You are diligent at tracking the ongoing work across the org and obsess over making sure stakeholders are aware of status and timelines.
• Technical Credibility: You have a strong background in software engineering. While you won't be coding every day, you possess the technical chops to guide architectural decisions, push back when necessary, and earn the respect of your team.
• Empathetic Leadership: You care deeply about the humans building the product. You know how to cultivate psychological safety and foster a culture of open, honest feedback in service of personal and professional growth.
• Why You’ll Love It Here
• A team that genuinely cares about the product and each other (our retention intent is off the charts!).
• High autonomy to make decisions that directly impact the daily work of the engineering org.
• Clair is willing to invest in being at the forefront of technology and pushing boundaries. We rarely, if ever, say no to trying a new tool and encourage everyone to experiment with the latest and greatest.
• Additional Details

Location:

This is a hybrid position based out in New York City, you will be expected to come into the office at least three days a week (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, & Thursdays) with additional days on occasion for client meetings.

We are also open to remote candidates for this role who are based in North America only.