Engineering Manager, Engagement

About The Team

The Engagement team at Mural owns the features that make Mural useful for teams to collaborate — the behaviors that turn solo exploration into shared work. This includes features like comments, threading, sharing, recommendations, and notifications. This team offers significant opportunities to shape its direction, working on problems that directly impact user retention and team expansion.

Your Mission

As the Engineering Manager for Engagement, you will lead the systems crucial for driving recurring usage and team expansion, two key pillars for Mural's long-term success. You will manage a team of approximately 5 engineers, focusing on delivering features that measurably boost daily/monthly active users (DAU/MAU) and workspace growth. This role requires close partnership with Product and Design to deeply understand user behavior, transforming occasional visitors into daily collaborators. You will serve as the technical lead for your team, ensuring the quality of shipped products and providing meaningful technical direction. Crucially, you will establish clear ownership of conversion metrics and cultivate a team culture focused on achieving outcomes rather than just delivering output.

What You'll Do

• Own engagement metrics end-to-end: Establish your team's direct ownership of critical conversion metrics such as DAU/MAU, team expansion, and workspace growth. Your accountability extends to moving the needle on these metrics, not just shipping features.
• Lead technical execution on high-impact features: Drive significant improvements to comments and threading, simplify sharing workflows, and enhance the utility of notifications and recommendations. You'll remain hands-on (30-40% coding time) for exploratory or non-critical path work, ensuring your team remains unblocked.
• Lead and grow a high-performing team: Invest strategically in hiring, retaining, and motivating strong engineers. Set clear expectations, provide timely feedback, and foster an environment where your team can perform at their best.
• Partner with Product and Design as equals: Operate within a collective triad that jointly owns outcomes. Collaborate closely to understand the drivers that transition users from individual exploration to team collaboration, embracing an early and continuous involvement model without handoffs or waterfall processes.
• Set and model high expectations for AI adoption: Embrace AI-driven development as a core practice at Mural. Actively model and champion the effective adoption of AI tools throughout every stage of the delivery lifecycle.

What You'll Bring

• Deep technical expertise: At least 5 years of experience shipping production-ready code, with a preference for fullstack Node.js/TypeScript. Strong engineers proficient in other modern stacks who can quickly adapt are also highly valued.
• Engineering leadership experience: 2+ years managing engineering teams of at least 3 individual contributors. Demonstrate a proven track record of building high-performing teams that consistently deliver complex projects, and maintaining high standards when challenges arise.
• Ownership mentality: Advocate vigorously for the best interests of the business, taking end-to-end ownership of problems that may extend beyond your team's immediate boundaries. Lead with accountability and constructive problem-solving rather than assigning blame.
• Ruthless prioritization: Exhibit a proven ability to refine scope to the smallest viable increment that yields meaningful feedback. Avoid premature scaling or over-engineering, focusing on obtaining early and frequent user feedback.
• An outcome-oriented and highly experimental interest in AI-driven development practices. You actively use AI tools in your own work and can credibly encourage your team to do the same.

Nice To Have

• Experience with WebSocket or real-time collaboration systems (familiarity is beneficial, though robust infrastructure exists).
• Background in engagement, retention, or growth-oriented product development.
• Experience with globally distributed teams and async-first collaboration methodologies.
• CST or EST time zones preferred.

Equal Opportunity

We are committed to ensuring individuals with disabilities receive reasonable accommodation throughout the job application and interview process, for essential job functions, and for other employment benefits and privileges. Please contact us to request accommodation.

Key skills/competency

• Engineering Leadership
• Team Management
• Engagement Metrics
• Node.js
• TypeScript
• Fullstack Development
• AI Adoption
• Technical Execution
• Product Collaboration
• Prioritization