Engineering Manager

About Portless

Portless is changing the face of global e-commerce. By decoupling brands from traditional, expensive domestic warehousing, we allow e-commerce companies to ship directly from manufacturing hubs to global consumers in as little as 3-5 days. We are growing fast, and we are looking for a data-driven, execution-focused Engineering Manager to run our day-to-day engineering operations and optimize our global delivery engine.

The Role

As the Engineering Manager, you will be the operational heartbeat of our engineering team. Reporting directly to the VP of Engineering (who owns technical vision, architecture, and macro-strategy), your sole focus will be execution, people management, and elite delivery metrics.

You will directly manage and optimize a highly collaborative, globally distributed team of ~10 engineers spanning the USA, Canada, EU, UK, and China. This role is a balancing act: you will be responsible for keeping the long-term feature roadmap moving forward while simultaneously building the triage frameworks and incident response models needed to handle live logistics and supply chain systems.

What You’ll Do

• 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.

What We’re Looking For

• 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.
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• 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.

Bonus Points (Nice-to-Haves)

• Domain Expertise: Prior engineering management experience in Supply Chain, Logistics, or E-commerce verticals.
• Integration Familiarity: Experience working with major e-commerce platforms (e.g., Shopify, WooCommerce) or complex cross-border shipping, tracking, and customs APIs. You understand the pain points of real-world data synchronization and physical-world dependencies.

Why Portless?

• 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.