Senior Engineering Manager

Thorn is a nonprofit building technology to defend children from sexual exploitation and abuse. The Senior Engineering Manager leads the Build Team’s engineers and partners with Product, UX, and technical leaders to shape, develop, and deliver reliable products for industry and law enforcement partners.

Responsibilities:

• Lead a high-performing, collaborative, and inclusive team of engineers with varied technical specialties across the stack. Build a culture of curiosity, healthy disagreement, learning, and accountability
• Partner closely with Product, UX, and technical leaders to understand user needs, shape product direction, and guide work from discovery and experimentation through release and iteration
• Work with technical leads and engineers to evaluate solutions across frontend applications, backend services, APIs, data systems, and infrastructure. Connect decisions across specialties and empower the people closest to the work to lead
• Create clarity around priorities, ownership, capacity, and expectations. Coordinate dependencies, surface risks early, clear roadblocks, and continually improve practices across the software development lifecycle to support effective planning, coordination, and delivery
• Balance product delivery with technical investments that improve reliability, security, privacy, maintainability, and developer experience. Help the team make deliberate choices about technical debt and long-term system health
• Collaborate with engineers, technical leaders, and cross-functional partners to navigate shared challenges, build alignment, and strengthen engineering practices across Build
• Manage and develop your direct reports through consistent 1-1s, quarterly check-ins, coaching, and timely, candid feedback. Set clear expectations, recognize strong performance, address concerns thoughtfully and directly, and proactively protect their wellness
• Support engineers with different skills, experience levels, and career goals by creating meaningful growth opportunities, developing technical leadership skills, and delegating ownership
• Define and lead the hiring process for your team in partnership with People & Culture, bringing diverse perspectives into the process and hiring for technical strength, collaboration, and mission alignment

Requirements:

• You have a commitment to putting the children we serve at the center of everything you do
• You have a demonstrated track record of managing and developing software engineers, building strong teams, and delivering products that meet real user needs
• You bring a strong software engineering foundation and experience leading engineers across frontend, backend, data systems, and cloud infrastructure
• You can guide technical decisions, connect work across specialties, and draw on the deeper expertise of others
• You have a passion for product engineering and experience partnering with Product and Design to turn ambiguous problems into practical solutions, learn from results, and improve what comes next
• You demonstrate strong judgment in balancing user needs, technical constraints, delivery commitments, engineering quality, and team capacity
• You adapt thoughtfully to emerging needs and shifting priorities, helping others understand tradeoffs and move forward with clarity
• You care for people and have experience setting clear expectations, providing candid feedback, and supporting engineers with varied skills and career goals
• You lead with empathy, humility, and accountability
• You collaborate across disciplines and team boundaries, earning trust through curiosity and follow-through, working through disagreements constructively, and helping others find shared direction
• You communicate clearly, efficiently, and thoughtfully with technical and non-technical audiences
• We're a highly-distributed team, so strong written communication and accessible documentation of decisions and context are crucial