Engineering Manager - Home Team

Coursera is one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, aiming to provide universal access to world-class learning. As the Engineering Manager for the Home team, you will lead a full-stack engineering team responsible for creating critical capabilities that enhance learner engagement and retention while fostering a high-performance team culture.

Responsibilities:

• Building the Team: Partner with cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Design, Data, Content Operations) to refine the team’s charter, ensure alignment with broader business goals, and support overall team health and growth
• Mentoring: Act as a role model and coach for engineers. Conduct regular career development conversations, provide constructive feedback, and inspire engineers to achieve their best
• Hiring: Identify key skill gaps and growth areas on the team. Drive the hiring pipeline by sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding talented engineers to build a well-rounded, high-performing team
• Advising (Technical Leadership): Provide hands-on technical guidance to engineers as they design systems and tackle complex problems. Encourage sound architectural decisions and help team members grow into technical leaders in their product work
• Product Enablement: In partnership with Product Management, curate a compelling vision for the logged-in home experience. Translate high-level product needs into an actionable engineering roadmap. Prioritize and drive key initiatives forward, run sprint planning and stand-ups, and ensure the team delivers product features that delight content creators and learners
• Platform Leadership: Balance building new features with managing tech debt to maintain a reliable, scalable platform. Evolve the platform for high leverage – architect systems and services that can accelerate multiple product initiatives across Coursera. Ensure consistency and quality in the user experience by creating reusable components and frameworks for content
• Mediating: Foster an inclusive, collaborative team environment. Proactively address interpersonal issues and facilitate crucial conversations with empathy and fairness. Ensure every team member feels empowered, engaged, and comfortable sharing ideas and concerns

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, OR equivalent practical experience (e.g. 3+ years as a hands-on software engineer building web applications or distributed systems)
• 5+ years in software product development or a related field, including prior experience leading engineering teams (2+ years in an engineering management role)
• Strong software engineering foundation with experience in system design, data structures, and algorithms
• Professional coding/development experience in your background, even if this role is not an IC position
• Demonstrated integrity, transparency, and inspiration in your leadership style
• Ability to empower and motivate a team to achieve ambitious goals
• High degree of empathy, humility, and effective communication skills
• Experience building inclusive team cultures and handling interpersonal dynamics with patience and tact
• Creative and analytical mindset with rigorous technical problem-solving skills
• Ability to navigate complexity and guide the team to well-reasoned, innovative solutions
• Excellence in driving clarity and results in ambiguous, complex situations
• Boldness and grit to chart a path forward even when the way is not fully defined
• Experience balancing rapid product feature delivery with long-term platform health
• Proven ability to manage technical debt and invest in platform infrastructure that yields high leverage across multiple products or use cases
• Experience managing a team that owns a product platform or critical infrastructure component
• Experience defining the team's charter and boundaries of ownership, especially in the context of evolving a new platform
• Experience with Generative AI applications including prompt engineering and using APIs such as OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini
• Demonstrated experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, using modern backend technologies such as Java or Scala and API frameworks like GraphQL and gRPC
• Understanding how to design systems for high availability, performance, and maintainability at scale
• Familiarity with modern frontend technologies (React, TypeScript, or similar) and how front-end interfaces integrate with backend services