Manager, Engineering

Who We Are: We’re a high-growth software company with a big mission : empowering K-12 district teams to do more with less.  At LINQ, we get K12. That’s why we help districts transform K-12 school operations with best-in-class, cloud-based software solutions built to help districts return more resources to classrooms. Integrating finance, HR, nutrition management, and payments into a single, secure platform, LINQ reduces administrative burden. LINQ is trusted by 30% of school districts across the U.S. to help them operate more efficiently and serve over 1 billion meals to 17 million students annually, process payroll for 364,000 educators, administrators, and staff, and engage with millions of families through the free LINQ Connect app.      Our team? They’re talented, committed, and fiercely loyal problem-solvers. At LINQ, you’ll find challenging and meaningful work, a team that respects and uplifts one another, and a commitment to constant improvement. Our customers love us because we’re attentive, patient, communicative, and solutions focused. They know they can count on us to not only anticipate their needs but to deliver the right answer every time.  LINQ’s Values:  • Act with Integrity & Build Trust: Trust is the foundation of our company. We operate with the highest standards of integrity, both internally and externally. We believe in transparency, honesty, and accountability. Building a culture where trust is earned and maintained.  • Deliver Excellence: We consistently exceed our clients’ expectations. In every interaction, we strive to anticipate needs, provide swift solutions, and go the extra mile to relentlessly impress our customers. We communicate clearly, consistently, and in a timely way to cultivate lasting relationships.  • Embrace Challenges: We embrace a growth mindset. Challenges offer opportunities to learn, grow, and improve. Continuous learning keeps us relevant and effective to ensure our solutions remain on the leading edge of innovation.  • Collaborate & Act as One Team: Diverse skills, ideas, and perspectives are our strength. Through open communication, shared goals, and a spirit of unity and mutual respect, we collaborate to achieve excellence, drive innovation, and propel our company forward as a cohesive force.  ABOUT THE TEAM Our School Nutrition team builds high-transaction-volume software that processes over 1 billion meal transactions annually across thousands of school districts. This is mission-critical infrastructure — it must work during the lunch rush, every school day, in cafeterias nationwide. We're building the next generation of nutrition management technology to help schools operate more efficiently while ensuring every student has access to healthy meals. ABOUT THE POSITION As an Engineering Manager for School Nutrition, you will lead the engineering team(s) building the platform that processes over 1 billion meal transactions annually across thousands of school districts. You'll partner closely with engineering leadership and product teams to ship mission-critical software — the kind that has to work during the lunch rush, every school day, in cafeterias nationwide. This is a player/coach role that leans firmly toward coach. Roughly 80% of your time is spent leading people — hiring, coaching, unblocking, raising the bar, and driving delivery — and the remaining time is spent where a manager's technical leverage is highest: architecture and design reviews, high-stakes code review, pairing on hard problems, and jumping into the code when production needs you. You're not here to pick up sprint tickets, but you are close enough to the code that your engineers trust your technical instincts and you can carry real weight during an incident. WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING Lead and grow a team of engineers across a blended FTE/contractor model - running meaningful 1:1s, writing growth plans, managing performance honestly, and giving direct, kind, actionable feedback Own delivery outcomes for the School Nutrition platform - partnering with Product to shape the work, not just receive it, and driving predictable, high-quality execution Partner with the Sr. Director of Engineering and your senior engineers to shape and execute the modernization roadmap - evolving the platform toward .NET Core, cloud-native services, and PostgreSQL without destabilizing daily delivery Raise the hiring bar and own the hiring loop for your team - sourcing, interview calibration, and closing talent Contribute as a technical leader in ADRs, design reviews, and high-stakes code reviews; weigh in on tradeoffs with enough depth that your technical voice genuinely sharpens the work Drive healthy engineering practices - testing discipline, CI/CD, DORA/flow metrics, and incident response - using evidence to guide improvement rather than opinion alone Enable the team to adopt AI-assisted development tooling (Claude Code) effectively and responsibly, modeling the practices yourself Cultivate a culture where engineers are confident to change code - when people are afraid to touch something, we move slowly and we break things Communicate up, across, and down clearly in writing - roadmaps, status, risks, tradeoffs, and decisions WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR Core Experience 3+ years managing software engineering teams, with a track record of shipping production software at quality Experience managing mixed FTE and contractor teams - with a clear sense of where those management approaches converge and diverge Strong technical background with substantial .NET / C# experience; you've shipped real systems and are sharp enough to contribute credibly in design and code reviews Comfort across Angular and SQL Server (or close-adjacent stacks you can ramp on quickly) Experience leading modernization work - evolving legacy systems incrementally without stopping the world Evidence-based management approach - familiar with DORA, SPACE, or equiv