Engineering Manager
About the Role
Invitation Homes set out to solve a real problem: home leasing options were limited and the experience for renters was inconsistent. Today, as the nation’s largest single-family home rental company, our engineering teams build the technology at the center of that solution — personalized resident experiences, service tools, and the operational systems that residents and associates depend on every day. When we ship, people feel it.
We’ve built an engineering culture that takes that responsibility seriously: collaborative teams, high standards, and a genuine investment in the people around you. Great software is built by engineers who are supported, growing, and proud of what they ship. This is the entry point into people leadership on the engineering management track — what many organizations call an Engineering Manager. Your primary lever shifts here: you multiply impact through your people, not your own code. You remain technically grounded — credible in design discussions, fluent in your team’s systems — but your focus is on building the conditions for your team to do great work.
Think of yourself as a player-coach — equally invested in the technical work and in the people, culture, and conditions that let your team thrive.
From here, you’ll have a clear path to Sr. Engineering Manager as your leadership scope and organizational reach grow.
What You’ll Do
Technical Leadership
- Stay technically grounded: participate in design discussions, understand the systems your team builds, and engage directly when your team needs your depth.
- Shape the technical direction of your team’s work in partnership with your engineers — and engage in technical conversations across the broader engineering organization to promote consistency and share perspective.
- Remove blockers: resolve ambiguities, clear organizational friction, and escalate where needed to keep your team moving.
- Own the health of your team’s systems — advocate for reliability, maintainability, and automation alongside delivery.
- Evaluate technical risk and help your team make sound decisions, even when the path forward isn’t clear.
Knowledge & Standards
- Maintain a deep understanding of your team’s systems, technical stack, and the challenges they face.
- Understand how your team’s work connects to business goals, customer experience, and company strategy.
- Use delivery data, team health signals, and engineering metrics to understand what’s working and what needs attention.
- Stay current in engineering and management practices — bring what you learn back to your team and your peers.
Communication & Collaboration
- Communicate clearly and proactively with your team, stakeholders, and engineering leadership — especially when the news is hard.
- Translate technical context for non-technical partners, and business context for your engineers.
- Provide feedback — to your team and upward — that is clear, specific, and actionable.
- Resolve ambiguity and conflict constructively; create space for healthy disagreement and clear, committed action.
Leadership & Culture
- Build a high-performing, inclusive, and psychologically safe environment where engineers can do their best work.
- Coach and develop your engineers through regular 1:1s, goal-setting, and deliberate career growth conversations.
- Manage performance with clarity and care — address gaps early and invest in growth before it becomes a problem.
- Lead hiring end-to-end: build strong pipelines, represent Invitation Homes well to candidates, and champion a great candidate and new hire experience.
- Delegate effectively, trust your team, and hold them accountable for their commitments.
- Model the values and behaviors you want to see — curiosity, humility, a bias to action, and genuine care for others.
What You Bring
- 5+ years of professional software development experience, including experience leading technical work within or across teams.
- Demonstrated technical credibility — you can engage meaningfully in design decisions and understand the systems your team owns.
- Experience managing or mentoring engineers, with a track record of helping others grow.
- Clear, effective communication skills — written and verbal — with the ability to build trust across technical and non-technical audiences.
- A record of navigating ambiguity, resolving conflict, and creating clarity for those around you.
- A genuine investment in others — you find meaning in developing people and building the conditions for teams to do their best work.
- Hands-on experience with cloud platforms, CI/CD practices, and modern iterative software delivery.
- A degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
Our Stack
Our engineering teams work with TypeScript, Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, and AWS — including Lambda, DynamoDB, and RDS. We practice CI/CD, favor infrastructure as code, and build on REST APIs and event-driven architectures. Salesforce is a significant part of our technology landscape — some teams build directly on the platform, while others integrate with Salesforce-managed APIs. Experience with these is a strong plus — though we care more about depth of thinking, adaptability, and the drive to keep learning than familiarity with any specific tool.