Engineering Manager - Foundational Services

ARE YOU READY TO TAKE YOUR CAREER TO NEW HEIGHTS? ARE YOU SEEKING A NEW CHALLENGE IN A DYNAMIC SECTOR?

This is a very exciting and highly innovative time here at Outside.

OUR TRUE NORTH:

Outside Interactive, Inc., the premier hub for active lifestyle enthusiasts, offers best-in-class content and experiences to more than 70 million of the world’s most passionate outdoor, wellness, and endurance enthusiasts every month. We inspire a broad and diverse audience to do the activities they love with greater enjoyment, inspiration, and knowledge and are dedicated to making real change in the outdoor and fitness industries.

Join Outside as an Engineering Manager for the Foundational Services team! You will manage 2 groups of engineers responsible for building shared services used within all products in order to provide a seamless experience. From the way people log in, update their account, and access their benefits, this team is tasked with delivering high-quality products & services at every touch point across our products.

As a leader, your primary role is to put the goals of our customers and business first, drive product and architecture decisions with your product and design counterparts, and help your team reach its maximum potential. You'll work closely with engineering leaders across Outside to set technical strategy and direction. You are accountable for the health and execution of these services and the team that builds them and so your skillset should also be sound in architecture, feature development, and code review.

Build and maintain a collaborative team culture that reflects the division's values: community > company > team > individual, transparency by default, and assuming good intent and expertise from others

Foster an environment where engineers understand the business impact of their work at every level

Model good hygiene - fix what's broken, clean up what's messy, and hold the team to the same standard

Manage conflict constructively, ensuring disagreements are resolved with low ego and a bias toward action

Work closely with the team’s Product Manager to help drive the road map while maintaining scope and technical boundaries

Run regular 1:1s and goal-setting conversations that keep engineers aligned on expectations and growing toward their interests

Actively seek out challenging, impactful work for each engineer based on their skills and career goals, while giving them room to occasionally fail and learn

Facilitate feedback conversations early and often - both giving and receiving

Participate in hiring to identify candidates who will strengthen the team's culture and technical capability

Build relationships with partner teams (Media, Mapping, and others) so that Identity & Subscription becomes the default foundation for Outside products as they expand

Triage inbound requests from customer service and cross-team stakeholders - distinguishing bugs, one-off fixes, and larger misunderstandings of platform capabilities

Communicate clearly across audiences, from engineers to product managers to senior leadership, adjusting depth and framing for each

Engage deeply with the team's architecture and technical decisions to ask good questions, identify tradeoffs, and provide meaningful direction without needing to be in the code

Ensure technical decisions are documented with clear tradeoffs

Facilitate planning exercises that surface unknowns and produce reliable estimates, accounting for tech debt and competing priorities

Author and mentor engineers on technical planning documents

Establish and model modern engineering practices including CI/CD, distributed tracing, DORA metrics, observability dashboards, and…