Senior Engineering Manager

About Medium

Medium is one of the world's most influential writing platforms, connecting millions of readers with ideas that matter. We're a small, dedicated team that cares deeply about craft, curiosity, and building something that lasts. We make decisions efficiently and iterate fast, think carefully, and take the work seriously - without taking ourselves too seriously.

About the Role

The last three years at Medium were about getting operationally fit. Now we're focused on what's next: new product bets, new surfaces, and the engineering foundation to support them and we need a Senior Engineering Manager to help lead that chapter.

In an era of AI-generated everything, Medium's bet is on the opposite: empowering real people to say something worth saying to other real people. That's the mission you'll be helping bring to life. This is an opportunity for a product-minded engineering leader who loves consumer products and cares about craft. You'll own the core Medium experience including the reading experience, the editor, navigation, and the product surfaces that define what it means to be a reader or writer on Medium. We operate with a ship-incrementally, learn-fast mentality: running experiments, reading the data, and adjusting quickly. Because we don't have a dedicated PM function, engineering leaders here can have an outsized impact on product direction for their teams.

Leading a team of senior and staff engineers, you’ll oversee the core Medium product experience, foster the long-term health and growth of your team, elevate best practices across the engineering organization, and partner with leaders and cross-functional stakeholders across the company to bring Medium’s product vision to life for millions of readers and writers around the world.

Key Responsibilities

Drive scope, impact, and strategic alignment

• Shepherd multi-quarter plans that align technical work with organizational goals and product strategy, while holding teams accountable for high-quality outcomes end-to-end
• Operate as a key cross-functional voice in prioritization, product strategy, and technical direction to turn high-level strategy into clear direction engineers can act on

Build and sustain great teams

• Own your team's hiring strategy end-to-end: attract great engineers across a broad range of backgrounds, represent Medium's mission and culture throughout the process, and think about long-term team composition
• Create an environment of genuine psychological safety where dissenting opinions are valued and people can do their best work
• Attend Medium’s twice-yearly, in-person offsites to collaborate with the team (hosted in locations around the U.S.)

Guide technical excellence

• Lead complex tradeoff conversations and decisions, such as velocity vs. tech debt, innovation vs. operational burden, and ambition vs. resourcing constraints, while always staying grounded in impact
• Guide the adoption of AI best practices and fluency while ensuring engineers remain accountable for code clarity, correctness, and the ability to reason about their systems

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

You're product-minded at your core with experience shipping high-quality user-facing products at scale. You understand your users deeply and you care about the craft of building experiences that people actually love. You think in systems and give deep consideration to things like team structure.