Senior Engineering Manager

Founded in 2017, Trust & Will is the leading digital estate planning platform, trusted by over one million users. We provide modern, accessible solutions to help families protect their legacies with attorney-approved, legally valid documents tailored to individual state requirements. Our seamless online platform simplifies the estate planning and settlement process, empowering individuals to create wills and trusts while also partnering with financial advisors, attorneys, and institutions to make legacy planning more inclusive and affordable.

If you are passionate about contributing to a high-impact mission and want to work in a collaborative environment where your skills and expertise will be valued, we would love to hear from you!

• You are a technical leader with deep expertise in React, Next.js, TypeScript, and Node.js.
• You excel at making architectural decisions, actively contributing to the codebase, and driving technical excellence across the team.
• You have a problem-solving mindset, prioritizing high-impact solutions and driving innovation in systems and processes.
• You view AI as a fundamental shift in engineering and actively seek opportunities to leverage it for innovation.
• You thrive in complex, fast-moving environments, balancing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and delivering results with a data-driven approach.
• You are a mentor and collaborator, fostering team growth, guiding engineers and engineering managers, and communicating technical solutions clearly.
• You are passionate about building secure, scalable systems, optimizing performance, ensuring reliability, and maintaining compliance.

Team Management & Growth

• Manage and mentor multiple teams of 3-5 engineers, ensuring their professional growth and success.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, provide continuous feedback, and guide career development.
• Foster a psychologically safe, inclusive, and collaborative team culture.
• Ensure effective onboarding, setting clear expectations and defining success metrics for team members.
• Identify skill gaps and growth opportunities, facilitating training and learning experiences.
• Manage budgets within teams and ensure proper resourcing.

Execution & Delivery

• Lead multiple engineering teams operating within a cross-functional product squad, collaborating closely with Product Managers and Designers.
• Own project execution, ensuring timely delivery of features while maintaining high-quality standards.
• Establish clear goals, priorities, and roadmaps in alignment with business objectives.
• Balance individual contributor responsibilities with managerial duties, contributing code when necessary.
• Track and improve engineering velocity, code quality, and team efficiency metrics.

Technical Strategy & Vision

• Drive technical decisions and architecture in alignment with long-term engineering and business goals.
• Identify and mitigate technical debt while advocating for scalable and maintainable solutions.
• Implement AI tooling and automation to enhance development workflows and system reliability.
• Consider AI from a strategic perspective, integrating it into products and engineering workflows.
• Collaborate with senior leadership to define and refine organizational structures, delivery practices, engineering best practices and development processes.

Technical Leadership & Impact

• Design, architect, and deliver scalable, high-performance applications and services, actively contributing code in a hands-on capacity (up to 50% of the time).
• Ensure solutions are robust, secure, and maintainable, aligned with industry best practices.
• Identify and Drive organization-wide technical improvements, including system reliability, performance, and security.
• Lead by doing - participate in code reviews, pair programming, and contribute to the technical roadmap while mentoring the team.

Quality & Impact

• Ensure you and your teams deliver high-quality, production-ready code, setting a strong technical example across the organization.
• Identify and lead initiatives to reduce technical debt and improve performance.
• Use observability and monitoring tools to proactively detect and resolve system bottlenecks.
• Ensure a culture of accountability and technical excellence, holding the team to high engineering standards.

Collaboration, Innovation & Mentorship

• Work closely with Product Managers, Designers, and stakeholders to align technical solutions with business needs. Serve as a critical partner in identifying business outcome opportunities.
• Utilize data-driven decision-making, incorporating product metrics and user feedback into engineering priorities.
• Mentor engineering managers and engineers at various experience levels, providing guidance and fostering technical growth.
• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Promote a culture of experimentation, innovation, and continuous learning.

Technical Leadership, Quality & Impact

• Architect, design, and deliver large-scale, high-performance features across the stack.
• Drive system-level design and data modeling, ensuring scalable, reliable, and maintainable solutions aligned with organizational best practices.
• Think expansively about AI—how to build with it, integrate it into features, and leverage it to drive innovation
• Own technical projects end-to-end, ensuring efficient delivery, optimal performance, extensibility, and reliability.
• Lead and contribute operational engineering strategies, including test automation observability and modern CI/CD practices.
• Collaborate on cloud architecture decisions to deliver resilient, cost-effective, and secure solutions.
• Deliver high-quality, production-ready code that adheres to coding and operational best practices, accounts for edge cases, and is self-documenting for maintainability.
• Lead efforts to reduce technical debt and optimize system performance through continuous refactoring and advanced debugging practices.
• Drive improvements in system reliability, scalability, and performance, leveraging monitoring and observability tools to proactively identify bottlenecks and issues.
• Champion a culture of learning by facilitating design discussions, providing constructive feedback, and fostering collaboration across teams.

Collaboration, Innovation & Mentorship

• Partner with product managers, designers, and cross-functional stakeholders to align technical efforts with business objectives and customer needs.
• Mentor engineers across skill levels, providing guidance in software patterns, architecture, DevOps, and problem-solving techniques to foster technical growth.
• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, ensuring alignment and shared understanding across teams.
• Promote knowledge sharing through technical documentation, share-outs, and peer collaboration to elevate team capabilities.
• Actively explore how AI can improve developer efficiency, automate workflows, and enhance system reliability.
• Explore and advocate for cutting-edge tools and technologies, incorporating them into the engineering stack when appropriate to advance capabilities.
• Lead initiatives to drive innovation and continuously improve engineering processes, challenging the status quo to deliver greater value.
• Contribute to system-wide architectural discussions to ensure alignment with strategic goals and future scalability.

• 7+ years of professional experience in software development with 4+ years in a leadership or management role including 2+ years managing other managers
• Advanced proficiency in React, TypeScript, API design, and data modeling (Both relational & noSQL).
• Experience leading teams in high-performing, cross-functional environments.
• Strong mentorship and coaching skills, with a proven ability to develop engineers.
• Ability to balance technical and managerial responsibilities, maintaining deep technical expertise.
• Experience building and maintaining cloud native applications.
• Strong grasp of secure coding practices, threat modeling, and compliance (GDPR, SOC2).
• Experience with DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and modern testing frameworks.
• Proficiency in AI-assisted development, using tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, RooCode, or RooCline.
• Skilled at defining and tracking engineering metrics to measure success and drive improvements.

• Experience using infrastructure-as-code tools (CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Pulumi, or Terraform).
• Experience leading an engineering team in a high-growth startup.
• Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, or other container orchestration tools.
• Experience with pair programming and collaborative development techniques.
• Active contributions to open-source projects or developer communities.

• Compensation: Salary + Equity
  • Our salary range for this position is $196,000 - $230,000, in addition to compensation we also include an employee equity package as a component of our offer along with other benefits and perks outlined below.
• PTO
  • Flexible time off that you are encouraged to use
  • Generous paid company holidays and breaks throughout the year 
  • Monthly friends & family day
  • Paid time off to volunteer in your community
• Health and Wellness Benefits
  • Fantastic health benefits including medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and generous parental leave 
  • Financial wellness benefits (Equity & tax advisory support, financial coaching support, and employee-sponsored 401k)
  • Guest speakers & reimbursement for learning opportunities
• Extra
  • Flexible work schedule + hours
  • Family-friendly work environment. We support the complexity of a remote world with the needs of families
  • Optional company-sponsored events and travel throughout the year
  • $500 Work from home stipend + Apple accessories 

About Trust & Will: 

• We are a remote-first company, giving our employees the flexibility they need to work in an environment that best suits their needs. Our hiring process is also conducted virtually unless otherwise noted. We are a company that was founded in San Diego, CA, and offer a collaborative co-working space that is available for you to use if you'd like but not required. #LI-Remote
• We are proud to be a certified B Corporation, using business as a force for good. We are committed to building a healthy, sustainable, and engaging working environment for all employees, their families, and communities. We publish an annual impact report to outline our positive contributions to our world and set an example for all employers.
• Trust & Will's mission is to help every family leave their legacy through affordable, accessible estate planning. That starts with the people we hire and the ways in which we support the development of their unique talents and capabilities. We are committed to prioritizing ways to make our company and industry more inclusive. This means we must be revolutionary in the way we value diversity to revolutionize our business sector. At Trust & Will, everyone has a seat at the table and space to be their authentic selves because only in a company that is inclusive and diverse can we truly stand in our members' shoes.
• California Privacy Notice: Trust & Will collects personal information from applicants including identifiers, professional/employment history, and education information to evaluate qualifications and communicate about your application. California residents have the right to know what information we collect, request a copy, correct inaccuracies, or request deletion (subject to exceptions). To exercise these rights, contact [email protected]. For more information, visit our privacy policy.