Movable Ink is standing up a new Orchestration team to build the next-generation AI decisioning layer that coordinates every message a brand sends across email, mobile, and other channels. We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead this team, hire its first engineers, and partner with a Lead Engineer and senior technical stakeholders to take the system from prototype to production. This is a hands-on, player-coach role at the intersection of distributed systems and machine learning, with high executive visibility and the opportunity to shape one of the most strategic engineering investments at the company.
This role will be reporting to the Director of Engineering (AI/ML).
Responsibilities:
- Lead People: recruit, mentor, and grow a founding team of engineers building the orchestration platform. Foster a culture of ownership, curiosity, and continuous improvement
- Shape the Technical Direction: partner with the Lead Engineer and senior technical stakeholders to converge on architecture, scope, and milestones for the system, with a clear path from prototype to production
- Deliver Production Value: drive key initiatives from concept to delivery, translating product goals into clear technical plans and ensuring the team ships high-quality, reliable systems
- Build the Platform: lead development of a scalable, event-driven, fault-tolerant system that processes high-volume real-time messaging decisions across workflows and channels
- Guide System Design: provide hands-on technical leadership for complex distributed, stateful, and real-time decisioning problems, contributing directly to architecture and design
- Partner Across the Platform: collaborate closely with Product, Machine Learning, Data Platform, and adjacent engineering teams to ensure the orchestration layer integrates cleanly into the broader product
- Drive Operational Excellence: ensure the platform operates reliably at scale through strong observability, metrics, incident response practices, and shared on-call responsibilities for business-critical services
Qualifications:
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineers, with a track record of recruiting, mentoring, and growing high-trust engineering teams
- A player-coach leadership style — comfortable guiding engineers while staying close to the technical work and contributing to architecture, design, and implementation when needed
- Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems that are fault tolerant, highly available, and highly concurrent
- Strong systems thinking, with sound architectural judgment around event-driven, stateful, real-time decisioning systems
- Experience building and operating backend services in a modern cloud environment (we use Google Cloud Platform)
- Hands-on experience with microservice and service-oriented architectures, including the inter-service communication patterns that compose them — synchronous, event-sourced, orchestrated, and asynchronous (we use gRPC and Kafka)
- Strong foundation in Python
- Experience with Elixir — which we use for building concurrent, fault-tolerant services — is a strong plus. Experience with Erlang, Scala/Akka, Go, or Clojure also transfers well
- Practical experience evaluating and designing for distributed systems fundamentals: partitioning, replication, back-pressure, idempotency, and failure handling
- Exemplary software engineering practices (system design, code review, testing, CI/CD)
- Strong focus on operational excellence, including observability, incident response, and healthy on-call practices
- Clear communicator and collaborator who can translate technical tradeoffs into practical decisions with product and business stakeholders
- (Nice to have) Experience with workflow orchestration systems (e.g. Prefect, Airflow, Dagster, Temporal)
- (Nice to have) Experience building, operating, or integrating with ML-driven decisioning or scoring system
The base pay range for this position is $152K - $200KCAD/ year, which can include additional bonus depending on the position ultimately offered, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. The base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
Studies have shown that women, communities of color, and historically underrepresented people are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture where all Inkers can thrive. If you’re excited about the role but don’t meet all of the abovementioned qualifications, we encourage you to apply. Our differences bring a breadth of knowledge and perspectives that makes us collectively stronger.
We welcome and employ people regardless of race, color, gender identity or expression, religion, genetic information, parental or pregnancy status, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, ethnicity, family or marital status, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, disability, Veteran status, or other protected characteristics. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.
