Engineering Manager
At a glance
Manager-level Engineering Leadership role at urbancompass. Boston · $194,000–$215,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Run sprint planning, set squad priorities, and clear blockers so engineers can deliver work steadily
- Manage and coach a mixed team of staff engineers and contractors, setting expectations and supporting career growth
- Turn business requests and user workflows into phased technical plans with product, design, and corporate partners
- Set team standards for reviews, automated tests, delivery pipelines, and system documentation
- Track application speed, reliability, and scale, and write plans, specifications, and postmortems for technical and business audiences
What you bring
- At least eight years in software engineering, with knowledge of design patterns, APIs, and cloud backend systems
- At least three years leading software engineering teams, including hiring, developing, and motivating engineers
- You have built SaaS, workflow, CRM, transactional, or enterprise software products
- You can lead work across employees and agency contractors while managing backlogs, trade-offs, and delivery quality
- You understand secure access permissions, data privacy, and protecting personally identifiable information
Who this fits
This manager role suits an engineering leader who can oversee a hybrid team and translate business needs into technical plans. The listed base salary is $194,000 to $215,000 per year.
From the employer
At Compass, our mission is to help everyone find their place in the world. Founded in 2012, we’re revolutionizing the real estate industry with our end-to-end platform that empowers residential real estate agents to deliver exceptional service to seller and buyer clients.
Engineering Manager
As an Engineering Manager at Compass, you'll lead high-performing teams building the tools that power daily workflows for hundreds of thousands of real estate agents. We are currently building a talent pool of exceptional engineering leaders to head teams across key areas of our product ecosystem including Broker Productivity, Agent Client Tools and CRM.
The Role
You will manage a lean, agile, and high-performing squad consisting of core full-time Compass engineers and a flexible pool of strategic contractors. This is an execution-focused leadership role where you will translate business needs into technical requirements, unblock development velocity, and ensure that our features are secure, performant, and built upon our centralized platform foundation. If you are a collaborative leader who thrives in a fast-paced environment and is passionate about solving real business problems with cutting-edge software solutions, we want to hear from you.
Responsibilities
- Lead Execution: Own the day-to-day agile development processes of your engineering squad. Successfully prioritize deliverables, manage sprint planning, and resolve blockers to maintain high team velocity.
- Nurture and Develop Talent: Directly manage, mentor, and grow a hybrid team of full-time software engineers and contractors. Provide clear performance standards, support technical skill development, and guide career growth.
- Partner with Product & Business Stakeholders: Collaborate closely with Product, Design, and corporate departments to deeply understand user workflows, translating ambiguous operational requests into clear, structured, and phased technical specifications.
- Champion Engineering Excellence: Enforce high-quality development practices on your team, including rigorous code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and comprehensive system documentation.
- Manage Operational Metrics: Monitor and optimize application performance, reliability, and scale, ensuring your team's systems are robust and highly available.
- Bridge Communication Gaps: Drive clear and concise business and technical discussions, writing high-quality project plans, technical specifications, and postmortems to keep both engineering and non-technical partners aligned.
Requirements
- Technical Background: 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a solid understanding of software design patterns, APIs, and modern cloud backend architectures.
- People Management Experience: 3+ years of experience directly managing software engineering teams, with a proven track record of hiring, developing, and motivating engineering talent.
- Domain Familiarity: Practical experience building applications within SaaS, workflow tools, CRM, transactional systems, or large-scale enterprise software products.
- Operational Execution Skills: Proven ability to manage a team's backlog, protect developers from over-commitment, make resource trade-offs, and predictably ship high-quality software.
- Experience with Hybrid Team Models: Demonstrated capability in directing and reviewing the work of both internal FTEs and external agency contractors, ensuring quality standards remain high.
- Strong Communication & Stakeholder Empathy: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with a proven ability to translate complex technical constraints into clear business terms for stakeholders.
- Security & Compliance Awareness: Solid understanding of data security concepts, specifically managing secure IAM permissions, protecting data privacy, and shielding PII.
Our Key Domains
We are looking for leaders to head engineering teams within the following business areas:
- Broker Productivity: Focusing on streamlining complex transaction management, compliance, and back-office SaaS workflows to help managing brokers run their businesses seamlessly.
- Agent Client Tools - Buy-Side: Crafting highly collaborative, consumer-facing interfaces and agent tools that guide buyers through every step of the journey, from initial home search to close.
- CRM Automation: Architecting programmatic engines, trigger-based workflow automations, and intelligent task-management systems that drive daily agent efficiency.
- CRM Platform: Building the highly scalable backend infrastructure, data pipelines, robust APIs, and integrations that serve as the foundation for our relationship-management ecosystem.
Compensation
The base pay range for this position is $194,000 - $215,000; however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Bonuses and restricted stock units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of benefits. Base pay is based on market location. Minimum wage for the position will always be met.
Perks that You Need to Know About:
Participation in our incentive programs (which may include eligible cash, equity, or commissions). Plus paid vacation, holidays, sick time, parental leave, and recharge leave; medical, tele-health, dental and vision benefits; 401(k) plan; flexible spending accounts (FSAs); commuter program; life and disability insurance; Maven (a support system for new parents); Carrot (fertility benefits); UrbanSitter (caregiver referral network); Employee Assistance Program; and pet insurance.
Do your best work, be your authentic self. At Compass, we believe that everyone deserves to find their place in the world — a place where they feel like they belong, where they can be their authentic selves, where they can thrive. Our collaborative, energetic culture is grounded in our Compass Entrepreneurship Principles and our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, growth and mobility. As an equal opportunity employer, we offer competitive compensation packages, robust benefits and professional growth opportunities aimed at helping to improve our employees' lives and careers.
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