Engineering Manager

ABOUT UNCHAINED

Unchained offers a suite of bitcoin financial services built on top of a unique collaborative custody model. These include: buying and selling bitcoin directly to and from cold storage, bitcoin retirement accounts, bitcoin-backed loans, concierge services to educate clients on best security practices, and cold storage solutions for institutions and other businesses.

POSITION OVERVIEW

The Engineering Manager at Unchained is a hands-on engineering leader responsible for building and sustaining a high-performing team that delivers a reliable, secure platform for our customers. Reporting to the Vice President of Engineering, this role blends people leadership with meaningful technical contribution—expecting to spend 50-75% of their time writing code, reviewing code, and participating in architectural discussions. The Engineering Manager owns consistent delivery and the health and growth of their team, balancing day-to-day execution with longer-term improvements to process and technical quality. This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of engineering craft and people leadership, and who embodies the Bitcoin ethos as we strive to deliver sophisticated financial solutions.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Strategic Leadership and Execution

• Own execution within the team, ensuring sprint commitments are met, priorities are clear, and work is well-scoped and delivered on time.
• Translate direction from the Director of Engineering and product partners into concrete plans the team can execute against, while also fostering innovation on the team.
• Balance feature delivery with technical debt reduction, reliability improvements, and security hardening.
• Identify and address bottlenecks in the team's development and release workflows to continuously improve velocity and quality.
• Maintain and improve engineering best practices, standards, and SOPs within the team.

Product Development

• Partner with Product to ensure engineering work is aligned with roadmap priorities and customer needs.
• Provide technical perspective during planning by surfacing risks, dependencies, and opportunities early.
• Advocate for investments in platform reliability, security, and maintainability alongside feature work.
• Stay aware of relevant Bitcoin and open source developments that could inform product or technical decisions.

Team Leadership & Management

• Lead, mentor, and grow a small team of 3-5 software engineers and senior software engineers.
• Own the onboarding, performance management, and career development.
• Set clear expectations and provide direct, kind feedback early ensuring there are no surprises.
• Build a team culture grounded in psychological safety, accountability, and transparency.

Technical Excellence

• Spend 50-75% of your time hands-on: writing code, reviewing pull requests, and participating in RFCs and architectural discussions.
• Raise the technical bar through judgment and advocacy by identifying better tools, patterns, and practices when warranted.
• Share responsibility for system quality outcomes, ensuring reliability, security, and operability standards are met.
• Participate actively in incident response, postmortems, and follow-through on action items.
• Champion a culture of code quality, testing, and continuous improvement within the team.

WHO YOU ARE

• You have 5+ years of senior software engineering experience, including 1+ years in an engineering management role.
• You have demonstrated the ability to remain hands-on technically while effectively leading and growing a team.
• You have a strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals—distributed systems, security best practices, and cloud environments (e.g., AWS).
• You have a track record of building healthy, high-performing teams with strong delivery predictability.
• You have excellent communication skills—able to align stakeholders, represent the team's needs, and communicate trade-offs clearly.
• You have hands-on familiarity with agile workflows, release management, and on-call/incident response processes.
• You live in the United States.

Even Better

• You have experience in fintech, payments, or Bitcoin/blockchain ecosystems.
• You have experience in regulated financial services (KYC/AML, banking, or payments).
• You have contributions to open source projects, ideally in the Bitcoin or financial software ecosystem.
• You have a bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Company paid medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 401k with employer match
• Employee stock options
• Unlimited PTO
• Training & development opportunities
• Remote work flexibility