Manager, Software Engineering

About this role

At NerdWallet, we’re on a mission to bring clarity to all of life’s financial decisions and every great mission needs a team of exceptional Nerds. We’ve built an inclusive, flexible, and candid culture where you’re empowered to grow, take smart risks, and be unapologetically yourself (cape optional). Whether remote or in-office, we support how you thrive best. We invest in your well-being, development, and ability to make an impact because when one Nerd levels up, we all do.

NerdWallet is looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead a customer-facing product team building across our React Native mobile app and our Next.js web experiences. NerdWallet's mobile app is at an inflection point. We are a trusted financial brand, and we are building an app that is “your money's smartest friend” on top of credit bureau and financial institution data, alongside a rich library of content from Nerdy financial experts. We are also evolving from a traditional product development model to a fully AI-native workflow, shifting from writing to building for product definition, and from human-written code to AI-generated code. Our three-year vision moves us from demand capture to demand creation, from waiting to be found to finding our customers in the financial moments that matter most in their lives. Successful candidates will have already led a product engineering team through the AI shift, will bring strong product and business instincts, and will hold a real performance bar for the people they lead. This person will lead a team through both the product ambition and the workflow shift at once, shipping the experiences that deepen how millions of users connect with their financial lives.

This role reports to the Senior Director, Engineering.

YOU ARE:

- A leader and a coach, accountable for your team's outcomes, its people, and its craft.

- You built software before you led people building it, and you have not left that behind, so you bring strong technical experience and judgment into conversations about what we build.

- You are not the team's technical lead. You draw the technical vision out of your most senior engineers and unlock it.

- You have your own point of view on what is worth building, what the data can support, and what AI can build and extend, and you bring recommendations to your Product and Design partners rather than questions.

- You think in systems rather than features, and you lead the team to build capabilities that compound instead of a growing list of one-off features.

- You hold a high performance bar for the people you lead, you develop them, and you lead the team through change rather than waiting for it.

- You collaborate laterally and operate as a peer to the other Engineering Managers in the organization. The product and business instincts you bring raises the bar for every team here, not just your own.

WHERE YOU CAN MAKE AN IMPACT:

- Own the outcomes of a customer-facing team of senior engineers building across our React Native mobile app and our Next.js web experiences.

- Shape the roadmap alongside Product and Design and have your own point of view on what is worth building, what the data can actually support, and what AI can build and extend.

- Lead the team to build systems that compound instead of a growing list of one-off features, so that what we ship next is cheaper and better because of what we shipped last.

- Lead an AI-native team and own how your team plans, defines, builds, reviews, and tests as AI reshapes each of those steps.

- A track record of managing to a high performance bar, delivering hard feedback, resetting expectations with someone falling short, and visibly investing in your strongest people.

- Make high-quality calls on when to trade polish for speed to learn, get real customer feedback into the team's hands fast, and hold the accuracy and reliability bar that financial advice people will act on requires.

- You built software before you led people building it, and you have not left that behind.

- Peer teams, partners, and leadership should know your team's strategy, roadmap, rationale, and progress.

- When the way we work needs to change, make the case, carry it with conviction, and stay with it until the new way is how the team actually operates.

YOUR EXPERIENCE:

- 8+ years in software engineering, including hands-on individual contributor experience.

- 2+ years managing engineering teams. This is not a first-time management role.

- Experience managing software engineers with accountability for a team's outcomes rather than its delivery dates alone, and the ability to name what your team changed for customers or the business.

- Experience leading an AI-native product engineering team, including specifics on what broke, and what you would do differently.

- Strong product and business instincts. A view on what to build, what to cut, and what the smallest test is that would tell us whether we are right.

- A track record of delivering hard feedback, resetting expectations with someone falling short, and visibly investing in your strongest people.

- Technical credibility on a modern web or mobile product stack, with the ability to engage engineers on architecture and tradeoffs.

- Comfort operating in ambiguity.

- Experience with data, experimentation, and measurement as the basis for product decisions.

- Experience hiring engineers and holding a bar while doing it

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience in consumer fintech.

- Experience with React Native, Next.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, and Apollo, or a comparable cross-platform mobile and web stack.

- Experience with personalization, recommendation, and systems built on customer data.

- Experience partnering with compliance and security on tradeoffs across speed, reliability, and risk.

- Experience defining an operating model rather than inheriting one.

- Experience coaching other managers, formally or informally.

WHE

Similar jobs

• Manager, Software Engineering — Ripple · Chicago, Illinois, United States
• Manager, Software Engineering — Zelis · Remote
• Manager, Software Engineering — Sonyinteractiveentertainmentglobal · United States, Aliso Viejo, CA
• Manager, Software Engineering — Sonyinteractiveentertainmentglobal · United States, San Mateo, CA
• Manager, Software Engineering — Meridianlink · Remote
• Manager, Software Engineering — Butterflymx · Remote
• Manager, Software Engineering — Arcboatcompany · Torrance, CA
• Manager, Software Engineering — Newrelic · Remote