Engineering Manager

Portless is changing the face of global e-commerce by enabling direct shipping from manufacturing hubs to consumers worldwide, focusing on fast delivery and innovative logistics solutions. They are seeking a data-driven, execution-focused Engineering Manager to oversee engineering operations and optimize their global delivery engine.

Location: United States

Responsibilities

• Drive Global Engineering Delivery: Take the technical roadmap defined by leadership, break it down, and execute across a fully distributed team. You own the sprint commitments, release cycles, and daily momentum across multiple time zones.
• Balance Planned vs. Reactive Work: Establish clean frameworks to handle competing priorities. You will ensure the team maintains high feature velocity while cleanly carving out capacity for ad-hoc bug triage, prioritization, and resolution without blowing up the sprint.
• Own Incident Management & On-Call: Define and run our real-time incident response processes. Because our logistics platform runs 24/7 across the globe, you will design sustainable, distributed on-call rotations and post-mortem cultures that drive down Time to Restore Service (MTTR).
• Architect Asynchronous Workflows: Design, implement, and champion operational processes that minimize the need for real-time meetings. Ensure high-quality documentation, clear handoffs, and independent execution are core to how the team builds.
• Own Delivery Metrics (DORA): Implement, track, and relentlessly optimize key delivery metrics. You will obsess over Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and Time to Restore Service to ensure a healthy, high-throughput pipeline.
• Champion AI-Augmented Engineering: Standardize and optimize the team's usage of modern AI development tools (e.g., Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code). Drive development practices that balance rapid AI-assisted execution with rigorous code review, security guardrails, and codebase cleanliness.
• Global People Management & Team Health: Actively manage, mentor, and coach a close-knit team of ~10 engineers. Conduct high-impact, flexible 1-on-1s, set clear performance expectations, and maintain a highly motivated, inclusive, and unified culture despite geographic distances.

Requirements

• The Global Startup Operator: 2+ years of experience directly managing a team of ~10 software engineers, with a proven track record of successfully running globally distributed, asynchronous teams.
• AI Fluency: You are an active user of modern AI development tools yourself and have a clear philosophy on how to lead a team utilizing them. You understand exactly where AI accelerates engineering and, crucially, where it introduces risk, tech debt, or quality issues. You view AI as a powerful tool for amplifying engineering output, enabling your team to achieve significantly more while maintaining high standards of quality. You bring experience and expertise in using AI tools in day-to-day operations as well as building AI enabled tools for wider adoption.
• Chaos Wrangler: Proven experience building triage systems for ad-hoc bugs and running real-time incident management for live, high-stakes production systems. You know how to categorize severity, shield developers from noise, and keep a cool head during production outages.
• A Master of Async Communication: Exceptional written communication skills. You default to thorough documentation, clear ticketing, and public channels over ad-hoc calls, setting the gold standard for how a global team interacts.
• Data-Driven Operator: You don't guess if a sprint went well; you use data. You have practical experience utilizing DORA metrics or similar frameworks to diagnose engineering bottlenecks and improve team velocity.
• People-First Leader: You excel at the human side of management. You know how to cultivate psychological safety and prevent burnout—especially when managing distributed on-call rotations—while maintaining a high bar for accountability.
• Technical Grounding: While you won't be setting the architecture or writing production code daily, you have a strong engineering background. You can confidently navigate code reviews, understand modern cloud workflows, and intelligently challenge estimates.
• Low Ego, High Alignment: You thrive in a partnership where you own execution and delivery, collaborating seamlessly with the VP of Engineering who owns the technical vision and architecture.

Benefits

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity package.
• Flexible, remote-first, and asynchronous-friendly work environment across multiple time zones across the world.
• The chance to run a highly impactful, 24-hour engineering engine at a company disrupting global logistics.