Sr. 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 role represents a meaningful shift on the management track — from leading a single engineering team to leading an organization of teams through a layer of engineering managers. You are accountable not just for what your teams deliver, but for how your managers lead. You translate company and department strategy into clear direction for your organization, and you build the leadership capability and operational health that makes sustained high performance possible.
Your focus moves from the growth of individual engineers to the growth of the managers who grow those engineers. Your leadership reach spans your organization of teams; your technical reach extends across the department — engaging on cross-team architecture, platform strategy, and systemic risk — while empowering your managers to lead day-to-day execution.
From here, you’ll have a clear path to Director of Engineering as your organizational scope and strategic influence grow.
What You’ll Do
Technical Leadership
- Maintain the technical credibility to engage meaningfully on cross-team architectural decisions, platform strategy, and build/buy/partner choices.
- Identify systemic technical risks, gaps, and dependencies across your organization — and drive resolution before they constrain delivery or culture.
- Partner with Staff and Principal Engineers to ensure your teams are aligned on technical direction and building toward long-term health.
- Set the standard for technical decision-making across your organization — governance, documentation, and accountability — modeled through your managers.
- Champion automation and sustainable engineering practices across your teams — ensure that manual toil doesn’t accumulate unchecked.
Knowledge & Standards
- Maintain a strong understanding of the architecture, systems, and technical challenges across all of your teams.
- Develop a working knowledge of organizational design — how to structure teams for delivery, growth, and resilience.
- Use metrics, team health signals, and delivery data to understand the state of your organization and identify where to focus.
- Build knowledge of what effective engineering management looks like, and use it to coach and calibrate the managers you develop.
Communication & Collaboration
- Distill complex, multi-team situations into clear communication for both senior leadership and your own managers.
- Proactively share context, risks, and outcomes with engineering leadership — bring the right information to the right people before they have to ask.
- Facilitate conversations that empower your managers to create alignment and own solutions — guide rather than dictate.
- Build strong relationships with Product, Design, and Delivery partners at the program and department level.
Leadership & Culture
- Coach and develop your engineering managers — help them grow as leaders, make better decisions, and build healthier teams.
- Foster a healthy, collaborative, and high-performing culture across your full organization, not just within individual teams.
- Operate effectively through layers: hold your managers accountable for their teams’ outcomes while ensuring those teams have the clarity and support they need.
- Lead talent strategy for your organization — recruiting, retention, performance management, and building a strong leadership bench.
- Set the bar for accountability and team ownership, and help managers recognize and address gaps in leadership, process, or team health.
- Maintain a bias to action across your organization — surface risks early, drive resolution proactively, and keep your managers and teams moving forward.
- Model the leadership behaviors you want to see in your managers — strategic thinking, humility, curiosity, and a genuine investment in others.
What You Bring
- 8+ years of professional software development experience, including experience managing engineering teams.
- A demonstrated track record of developing engineers and building high-performing teams.
- Experience managing or developing engineering managers, or demonstrated readiness to lead through a layer of management.
- Strong organizational instincts — you think across teams, not just within them, and understand how structure, culture, and process affect delivery.
- Clear, effective communication skills — written and verbal — with the ability to influence and build trust at senior levels.
- A genuine commitment to developing leaders — you find meaning in growing managers as much as in growing engineers.
- 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.