Engineering Manager

About Great Question:

Great Question is the end-to-end agentic user research platform. Our platform enables teams to recruit participants, run research, and share insights - all in one place. Backed by world-class investors and trusted by industry-leading teams like Gusto, Experian, Canva, and Brex, we're building the future of customer research.

We believe AI is a multiplier for creativity, speed, and scale. Everyone on the team is encouraged to lean into AI, not just to be more efficient, but to push boundaries and unlock new possibilities. Whether you're writing, designing, coding, or analyzing, we expect you to explore how AI can elevate your craft.

Our culture is built on high trust, high agency, and high emotional intelligence. If you're looking for a place where your voice matters, where work is fun, and where you're empowered to do your best - join us in redefining user research

I'm PJ, CTO at Great Question. My co-founder Ned and I built this company on a simple idea: talking to your customers should be easy. That's only become more relevant as building gets faster, but validating your ideas is still slow and painful.

Research, design, and product teams at ServiceNow, Brex and Canva run their customer research on us, and we raised a $13M Series A led by Inovia late last year after going through YC in 2021.

This year we've been rebuilding core parts of our product agent-first, and the engineering team is growing to match. I'm hiring an Engineering Manager to lead two of the teams at the center of that work.

THE ROLE

As Engineering Manager, you'll lead our Methods and Insights teams and report to Marcelo, our Director of Engineering. Alongside our Research Operations team, these are the pillar teams behind most of the product. Methods powers every study and the experience participants see; Insights makes sense of the data and helps customers act on it.

The job has three parts, and we need all of them:

• People. Hiring and staffing, 1:1s, coaching, feedback, performance management and growth. You're the person your engineers trust to tell them the truth about their work, and to push hard for their growth.
• Delivery and operations (trains on time). You run the cycle for your teams: planning, sequencing, unblocking, managing risk and working with stakeholders, and you lead the change as we evolve how we build. You make sure what we committed to actually ships, at a quality we're proud of, and you own your teams' operational health once it's live, from monitoring to red-teaming.
• Building the factory. Our engineers each run several agents, so the slow part is no longer writing code. It's specs, review and judgment. You help build that system for your teams: the harness, conventions, CI gates and shared components that let agents do good work and let people trust what comes out, quickly.

The building is real, but it isn't feature work. Think shared components, the agent harness and developer experience your teams run on, and the key architectural calls. You'll work closely with our PMs, Head of Product and the founders on what each team takes on, and you'll own how those bets turn into shipped work.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

How you lead. You manage people, not tickets. You know what each engineer on your team is trying to grow into, you give direct feedback early, and you've had the hard conversations: the engineer who's checked out, the promotion that isn't ready yet, the call that upsets someone. Strong engineers want to work for you because you make them better and get out of their way.

How you deliver. You turn half-shaped problems into a sensible sequence of work, spot the project that's quietly slipping before it slips, and know when a plan needs more structure and when it needs less. You have the system design chops to help an engineer through a hard design, and to tell when an estimate or a blocker doesn't hold up.

Who you are. We're a small team of exceptional engineers, and we only hire people who raise the bar.

• This isn't your first EM role; you've hired, run performance cycles and grown people into bigger scope.
• Technically strong: at least a solid senior engineer by our bar. You don't need to be the best engineer on the team, but you've built and run production systems yourself, and the engineers you lead respect you because you've done the work.
• Live in an agentic coding harness (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor - we don't care which), with real opinions about how a team, not just an individual, should work with agents to ship fast without letting quality slip.
• Resourceful under ambiguity. You add just enough process to keep a team unblocked, and no more.
• Close to the product. You care whether what shipped actually worked for customers, not just whether it shipped.
• Write clearly. We're remote and async-heavy; people who write clearly think (and prompt) clearly.

HOW WE BUILD

We've rebuilt how we work around AI agents, so our engineers are unblocked to work at AI-native speeds. Part of your job is keeping it that way as the team grows.

• Main goes to production and approvals aren't always required. Fast, automated CI is the gate, and we trust people to make the right judgments.
• We invest in making the codebase easy to work in: written runbooks and conventions that help agents and new people find their way around quickly.
• Running a few agents in parallel is easy, and expected. Sandboxes and preview environments are trivial to spawn.
• You'll always have the latest tools and models, and we're generous with tokens.
• Light on ceremony, high on accountability and communication.

This might not be for everyone, but if it excites you, please apply. We're especially keen to meet managers who'll challenge some of these ideas with their own hard-won lessons from the arena.

YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS

We expect you to hit the ground running, and fast.

• Week 1: a 1:1 with every engineer on your teams. Use the harness to learn the codebase and merge your first PR. You're in the customer data and the team's Slack channels, learning where work gets stuck.
• First 30 days: you know what each engineer is working toward and where each team's delivery is at risk. You've taken over the rhythms of both teams and shipped something alongside them.
• By 60 days: you own delivery for Methods and Insights. You've fixed at least one thing about how the teams plan and execute with their PMs, and shipped a shared component or developer-experience improvement your teams lean on.
• By 90 days: both teams ship predictably, and your engineers would tell you they're growing. You have a view on hiring and team shape, and you're pushing engineering strategy with Marcelo and the founders.

WHO SHOULDN'T APPLY

• You manage through process. If your instinct is more ceremonies, more tickets and more status meetings, our engineers will tell you so, quickly.
• You've stopped building. You don't need to be the strongest IC on the team, but you need to be in the code, the tools and the architecture.
• You want to build full-time. The people come first here, and that has to be the part you're excited about.
• This would be your first time managing. We'd love to meet you for a future role, but this one needs someone who's done it before.
• You're not all-in on AI, or you think moving fast means lowering the bar. Agents are how we work, and you'll set the example: shipping fast with them while holding a high technical and quality bar. Anyone can vibe-ship; getting that balance right is the job.
• Ambiguity and shifting priorities wear you down. Problems arrive here half-shaped, and the roadmap has changed under our feet more than once this year.

HOW TO APPLY

Send us a few sentences on a team you've led and what it shipped, and on why you're interested in this role. A link to something you or your team built that real people are using is a bonus.
Why You'll Love Working Here:

• A culture of customer obsession and curiosity
• Opportunity to shape and scale a critical business function
• Remote-first culture with high trust and high autonomy
• Annual team retreats and virtual events
• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI integrations that matter
• Competitive compensation & equity
• Generous PTO, health benefits, and learning stipend

Equal Opportunity Statement

Great Question is committed to providing a workplace free from discrimination or harassment. We expect every member of the Great Question community to do their part to cultivate and maintain an environment where everyone has the opportunity to feel included, and is afforded the respect and dignity they deserve.

Decisions related to hiring, compensating, training, evaluating performance, or terminating are made fairly, and we provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified candidates and employees. We examine our unconscious biases and take responsibility for always striving to create an inclusive environment that makes every employee and candidate feel welcome.