Engineering Manager, Canvas Core

ABOUT THE TEAM

Our engineering teams are the technical backbone of Mural's collaborative platform, building systems that power visual collaboration for millions of users globally. We believe great engineering leadership comes from deep technical expertise combined with the ability to inspire and guide talented engineers. Our culture values hands-on leadership, technical excellence, and pragmatic decision-making that delivers real value to users while building for the future.

YOUR MISSION

As an Engineering Manager at Mural, you will lead by example, maintaining hands-on involvement in the codebase while guiding a small, high-performing team to deliver exceptional user experiences. You will own the architectural decisions within your team's boundaries, working within Mural's common stack and standards while making critical technical choices that balance immediate user needs with long-term platform sustainability. You will cultivate engineering excellence through mentorship and coaching, helping your team members grow their technical skills and advance their careers. Most importantly, you will ensure your team ships high-quality code that directly impacts how millions of users collaborate visually every day.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• Lead technical execution: Actively contribute to the codebase alongside your team (30-40% of your time), participating in code reviews, debugging production issues, and implementing critical features while maintaining high standards for code quality and system reliability

• Balance technical vision with delivery: Articulate a longer-term technical vision while making pragmatic tradeoffs between technical decisions and delivering immediate user value, with solid understanding of computer graphics and distributed systems concepts (matrix transformations, scene graphs, quadtrees, CRDT, websockets, document databases) and familiarity with cloud infrastructure (Azure, AWS, Databricks)

• Build and mentor a world-class team: Coach engineers through technical challenges, conduct meaningful 1:1s focused on growth, provide actionable feedback on code and design decisions, and create clear career development paths that leverage each engineer's strengths

• Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner closely with Product Managers and Designers to shape roadmaps, translate business requirements into technical solutions, and ensure your team delivers measurable impact on key metrics

• Champion engineering excellence: Establish and maintain high standards for testing, monitoring, cost management, and operational excellence, ensuring your team's services handle scale gracefully and incidents are resolved swiftly

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

• Deep technical expertise: Minimum 5 years of hands-on software engineering experience shipping production code, ideally with Node.js/TypeScript and React, though we welcome strong technical leads from other modern stacks who can quickly adapt. At least 3 years of experience with WebSockets, Canvas/WebGL technologies, or other real-time and graphics technologies.

• Solid engineering leadership experience: 5+ years managing engineering teams, with a track record of building high-performing teams that identifies the important problems to be tackled and delivers technical solutions on time without unnecessary complexity

• Pragmatic scope editing: Proven ability to make smart short-term tradeoffs, including strategically taking on technical debt to validate ideas quickly or ship MVPs, while understanding the long-term implications and planning to pay down accumulated debt opportunistically.

• Mentorship and coaching skills: Demonstrated success in developing engineer careers through technical mentorship, constructive code reviews, and creating growth opportunities that challenge team members appropriately

• Thrives in dynamic environments: Experience leading teams through technical transformations, platform migrations, or rapid scaling challenges, with the ability to maintain team momentum during change

• Strong communication: Ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and articulate technical vision clearly to both your team and leadership

• Agile delivery experience: Hands-on experience with Scrum or Kanban methodologies, with a focus on continuous delivery and iterative improvement, including trunk-based development, feature flagging and automated testing

Nice to have

• Experience with globally distributed teams and asynchronous collaboration

Equal Opportunity 

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.