Engineering Manager

Unchained is a company that offers a suite of bitcoin financial services built on a collaborative custody model. The Engineering Manager is responsible for leading a high-performing engineering team, ensuring the delivery of a reliable platform while balancing technical contributions with team leadership.

Responsibilities:

• Own execution within the team, ensuring sprint commitments are met, priorities are clear, and work is well-scoped and delivered on time
• Translate direction from the Director of Engineering and product partners into concrete plans the team can execute against, while also fostering innovation on the team
• Balance feature delivery with technical debt reduction, reliability improvements, and security hardening
• Identify and address bottlenecks in the team's development and release workflows to continuously improve velocity and quality
• Maintain and improve engineering best practices, standards, and SOPs within the team
• Partner with Product to ensure engineering work is aligned with roadmap priorities and customer needs
• Provide technical perspective during planning by surfacing risks, dependencies, and opportunities early
• Advocate for investments in platform reliability, security, and maintainability alongside feature work
• Stay aware of relevant Bitcoin and open source developments that could inform product or technical decisions
• Lead, mentor, and grow a small team of 3-5 software engineers and senior software engineers
• Own the onboarding, performance management, and career development
• Set clear expectations and provide direct, kind feedback early ensuring there are no surprises
• Build a team culture grounded in psychological safety, accountability, and transparency
• Spend 50-75% of your time hands-on: writing code, reviewing pull requests, and participating in RFCs and architectural discussions
• Raise the technical bar through judgment and advocacy by identifying better tools, patterns, and practices when warranted
• Share responsibility for system quality outcomes, ensuring reliability, security, and operability standards are met
• Participate actively in incident response, postmortems, and follow-through on action items
• Champion a culture of code quality, testing, and continuous improvement within the team

Requirements:

• 5+ years of senior software engineering experience, including 1+ years in an engineering management role
• Demonstrated the ability to remain hands-on technically while effectively leading and growing a team
• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals—distributed systems, security best practices, and cloud environments (e.g., AWS)
• Track record of building healthy, high-performing teams with strong delivery predictability
• Excellent communication skills—able to align stakeholders, represent the team's needs, and communicate trade-offs clearly
• Hands-on familiarity with agile workflows, release management, and on-call/incident response processes
• Live in the United States
• Experience in fintech, payments, or Bitcoin/blockchain ecosystems
• Experience in regulated financial services (KYC/AML, banking, or payments)
• Contributions to open source projects, ideally in the Bitcoin or financial software ecosystem
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field