Associate Engineering Manager

Summary

Join OpenSesame as an Associate Engineering Manager to lead and support a team of engineers focused on Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions. You will help your team develop the context, skills, and processes needed to consistently deliver valuable work. In your first 90 days, you will build trust with your team and stakeholders, understand team strengths and challenges, and align delivery practices with organizational values. By six months, you will be a trusted team leader, delivering product outcomes, improving engineering quality, and supporting your engineers' growth. Within a year, you will be a reliable and collaborative member of the engineering management team, contributing beyond your immediate team and growing your leadership influence. This role is remote-first and based anywhere in the US, with up to 15 days of travel per year.

Responsibilities

• Lead and support a team of engineers focused on Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions
• Help your team develop the context, skills, and process needed to consistently deliver valuable work with a high level of quality, accuracy and reliability
• Build trust with your distributed engineering team and key stakeholders
• Understand team strengths and challenges
• Align delivery practices with organizational values
• Develop a system-level view to improve effectiveness
• Build strong relationships with a distributed team of seven engineers across timezones and varying experience levels
• Conduct 1:1s to understand each team member’s career goals, motivations, frustrations, and strengths
• Understand your teams’ current processes
• Engage with stakeholders to understand expectations, friction points, and dependencies related to IAM initiatives
• Collaborate with the team lead on team members’ career development spreadsheets
• Hire full-time employees as appropriate
• Understand your teams vision, current mission and backlog priorities
• Understand how the team’s deliverables fit into the big picture of the organization
• Understand how to use your team products
• Partner effectively with the team’s Product Manager to align on execution, drive clarity in planning, and enable continuous improvement across the IAM portfolio
• Work with the Senior Engineering Manager to develop a plan that strengthens the team’s delivery capability, sustainability, and technical resilience
• Ensure there is a balanced backlog planning that includes time for innovation, experimentation, and paying down technical debt
• Establish yourself as the primary point of contact for Engineering stakeholders, shielding the team from unproductive interruptions and ensuring they can focus on delivery
• Set up your development environment and review the team’s codebase to understand architecture, technical decisions, and areas for investment
• Begin applying systems thinking to understand how team outcomes are shaped by processes, culture, and environment
• Maintain awareness of team dynamics and team members’ interpersonal relationships across your distributed team
• Provide coaching, mentoring and/or mediation as needed to continuously improve your teams’ team dynamics
• Provide or source training, coaching, and/or mentoring for teams’ and team members’ weak spots
• Tailor your leadership approach to individuals’ learning styles and strengths
• Ensure the team has the context needed to make excellent decisions without your active involvement
• Partner closely with the Product Manager to improve grooming, planning, and prioritization workflows; track and improve delivery predictability
• Strike a balance between shielding the team from inappropriate stakeholder interactions and enabling the team to work directly with stakeholders to understand their needs
• Advocate for IAM initiatives that align with organization strategy; communicate trade-offs clearly to stakeholders and senior leadership
• Share transparent, realistic views of capacity and risks
• Optimize the team’s forecasting, and definition of done to improve planning accuracy and delivery confidence
• Remove yourself as a bottleneck to team decision making
• Identify paths for continuously improving developer experience, tooling and internal quality
• Create opportunities for cross-team pollination and shared growth
• Build strong peer relationships with other engineering managers; understand their teams’ needs, opportunities, and points of collaboration
• Collaborate on improvement efforts that span beyond your own team
• Be a resource that other managers turn to for advice and guidance
• In partnership with Product Management, you’ll help drive better execution on cross-team efforts
• As you continue to grow, you’ll contribute insights to help engineering leadership identify and address systemic challenges, particularly those impacting collaboration with internal business stakeholders

Benefits

• The base salary for this position generally ranges between $192,000 and $208,000 depending on experience, and is bonus eligible
• At OpenSesame, we offer a comprehensive benefits package to employees upon hire, including professional development, ISOs, health insurance, 401(k) matching, and paid time off
• This position can be based anywhere in the US
• We operate as a remote-first company, and invest in mandatory all-company meetings several times a year in addition to required team travel as necessary