Engineering Manager, Advisor Enablement

New York City

(Standard Company Intro Omitted for brevity - keep as is)

About The Role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and empower a cross-functional sprint team on Fora’s Advisor Enablement pod. Our team's mission is to empower a new generation of travel entrepreneurs by designing smart, scalable tools that make trip planning seamless and impactful. From itinerary builders to workflow automations, you’ll collaborate closely with Product, Design, and your engineers to drive impactful business outcomes.

At Fora, we believe Engineering Managers need to stay close to the technical details to be successful. We expect our managers to be masters of the craft, capable of going deep into the details, mastering the fundamentals, and honing their skills. This is a role for a leader who stays technically sharp:

• You will make scope and tradeoff decisions with Product and Design that require a tactical understanding of what is hard vs. easy to do in our specific codebase.
• You will direct long-term technical strategy, requiring you to understand how our technologies scale as we grow from 50 to 100 to 200 engineers.
• You will be expected to jump in to unblock junior engineers or resolve severity incidents.

To ensure this depth, the first 1-2 months for new EMs are spent contributing to features to gain familiarity with the codebase. Long-term, the day-to-day involves writing less feature code, but the expectation to be "hands-on" remains part of our culture from the top down.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with Product and Design to shape product strategy, ensuring that your team builds the right solutions that drive the highest impact on the business.
• Improve team efficiency and engineering velocity, ensuring your team delivers value quickly without compromising on quality, maintainability, or reliability.
• Guide architecture and technical decisions, balancing trade-offs and proactively anticipating future issues to ensure robust and scalable solutions.
• Leverage your technical depth to unblock engineers, resolve complex technical hurdles, and drive operational excellence across reliability and performance.
• Promote high team engagement, employee happiness, continuous skill development, and professional growth.
• Mentor engineers, provide constructive feedback, and support direct reports to help them overcome challenges and deliver on ambitious goals.
• Maintain hands-on familiarity with the system by performing code reviews, debugging, and during your first ~60 days, shipping feature code.
• Participate in hiring processes and attracting top engineering talent to support the continued growth of your team and our organization.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience in engineering management roles with a proven track record of driving successful product deliveries and team growth.
• 8+ years experience in web systems development.
• A "hands-on" mindset: You are willing to spend your first 1-2 months coding to learn the system, and you are comfortable passing technical rounds (even our Director-level hires do this).
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, effectively manage performance, and build highly motivated, engaged teams.
• Strong technical acumen, with experience making informed architectural decisions, addressing technical debt, and setting robust engineering standards.
• Exceptional project management and organizational skills, including the ability to break down complex projects, anticipate risks, and deliver consistently high-quality outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills, able to translate technical concepts clearly to diverse stakeholders and facilitate productive, drama-free project launches.
• Proven recruiting experience, capable of evaluating engineering candidates effectively and representing the company positively.
• A collaborative, empathetic leadership style that emphasizes humility, openness to feedback, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Entrepreneurial mindset and comfort working in an early- to mid-stage startup environment where ambiguity and pace are part of the fun.
• First-principles thinker who carefully evaluates each problem, thoughtfully choosing between established best practices and bespoke solutions, especially when designing team processes and norms.