Talent Network: Engineering Manager at toptal

Job Summary: We’re seeking a hands-on Engineering Manager with strong technical depth to lead a small, high-velocity team building an AI-powered career services platform. This is a tech lead hybrid role - you’ll split time between people leadership and technical oversight, reviewing PRs, challenging architectural decisions, and ensuring engineering quality across a modern Rails + Next.js stack. You should be deeply fluent in AI-assisted development workflows and push the team to stay on the cutting edge of how AI transforms software engineering. This is a remote position. We do not offer visa sponsorship or assistance. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English. Responsibilities: This is a hybrid Tech Lead + People Manager role with real technical influence - not just process management. You will be leading a small team where your decisions directly shape the product and architecture. You will be joining a team embracing an AI-first culture - the team actively uses LLMs for development, and the product itself is AI-powered. You will be working on an early-stage product with room to define engineering culture, hiring bar, and technical direction, and on a modern tech stack: Rails 7.1 with YJIT, Next.js 15, Turbo monorepo, and well-structured domain boundaries. Lead and grow a small engineering team (2-3 engineers), running weekly demos, sprint planning, and 1:1s. Review pull requests with meaningful, actionable feedback — identify risks, anti-patterns, and improvement opportunities. Assess technical architecture proposals and flag risks around scalability, maintainability, and complexity. Own team delivery — scope work, break down epics, remove blockers, and ensure consistent shipping cadence. Drive AI-first engineering practices — champion AI coding tools, LLM-assisted workflows, and prompt engineering across the team. Collaborate with product and design on roadmap prioritization, balancing technical debt with feature velocity. Participate in architectural decisions across a modular Rails monolith and Next.js frontend monorepo. Hire, onboard, and develop Engineers as the team scales. Establish and maintain engineering standards, code review culture, and incident response practices. Qualifications and Job Requirements: 15+ years of engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a tech lead or engineering management role. Strong code review skills — able to distinguish good from bad code and articulate why. Ability to evaluate technical architecture trade-offs in real-time during design discussions. Hands-on with backend systems (Ruby on Rails, Python, or similar) — you don’t need to commit daily, but you need to read, contribute code, and lead the team on production code. Active, demonstrated experience as an AI-first Tech Lead. Pushing the boundaries of development. Use of AI development tools (Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) in your own workflow. Genuine curiosity about LLMs and AI-assisted engineering — you follow developments and experiment. Strong communication skills — clear writing, direct feedback, effective facilitation. Experience managing small teams with high autonomy and low process overhead. Track record of shipping products in fast-paced, startup-like environments. Experience with Ruby on Rails and/or Next.js/TypeScript is a plus. Background in AI/ML product development or LLM API integrations is a plus. Experience with modular monolith or domain-driven design architectures is a plus. Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure knowledge (GCP preferred) is a plus. Familiarity with event-driven patterns, background job systems (Sidekiq), or async processing pipelines is a plus. Experience with subscription/SaaS business models and payment integrations is a plus. Observability tooling experience (DataDog, Sentry, Prometheus) is a plus. You must be a world-class individual contributor to thrive at Toptal. You will not be here just to tell other people what to do.