Senior Manager, Software Engineering (SMB)

At NerdWallet, we’re on a mission to bring clarity to all of life’s financial decisions, and every great mission needs a team of exceptional Nerds. We’ve built an inclusive, flexible, and candid culture where you’re empowered to grow, take smart risks, and be unapologetically yourself (cape optional). Whether remote or in-office, we support how you thrive best. We invest in your well-being, development, and ability to make an impact because when one Nerd levels up, we all do.

NerdWallet is looking for an experienced Senior Manager, Software Engineering to lead and oversee multiple full-stack engineering teams to ensure successful design, development, and delivery of high quality products for the SMB (Small and Medium Business) team at NerdWallet.

The Senior Manager, Software Engineering role will act as a key technical leader and direct the strategy and evolution of a mature product. In this role you will identify subtle, but high-impact areas for innovation and expansion that maximize business value. You will leverage your strong technical judgment and data architecture fluency to ensure that systems are scalable, reliable, and built for growth. You’re comfortable diving into code and product reviews when needed, setting a high bar for engineering excellence. As the technical expert, you will help stakeholders at all levels across engineering, product, and business teams connect the dots between technical execution and business objectives in order to drive prioritization to ensure that the team moves quickly from ideation to impact and know when to make trade-offs between speed and quality and/or knowing when to prioritize experimentation or stability.

This role reports to the Director, Product Management.

WHERE YOU CAN MAKE AN IMPACT:

- Engineering Leadership & Execution

- Lead and mentor a high-performing team of 12+ software engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and collaboration.

- Partner with Product and Senior Leadership, to develop a business strategy and long-term roadmap for an entire platform and product portfolio, balancing stability, maintenance, and strategic innovation.

- Oversee the design, development, testing, and deployment of complex, high-volume, and reliable systems that meet rigorous quality standards.

- Maintain and improve operational excellence (monitoring, SLAs, post-mortems, etc.).

- Manage engineers' career paths and performance through setting objectives, regular feedback, and technical mentorship, sharing best practices.

- Data-Driven Yield Optimization

- Establish a robust, data-centric strategy for identifying, quantifying, and eliminating yield/efficiency detractors within the product's operational flows.

- Partner closely with Product Management to implement the necessary data infrastructure, pipelines, and tooling to capture granular operational metrics that directly inform yield.

- Drive the execution of engineering projects specifically aimed at increasing business yield (e.g., optimizing resource allocation, reducing transaction failure rates, improving throughput, lowering latency/cost) based on newly derived data insights.

- Product Innovation & Strategy

- Translate complex business goals related to yield and efficiency into clear, executable technical requirements and engineering deliverables.

- Champion best practices in engineering, including code review, performance tuning, system reliability, and disaster recovery.

YOUR EXPERIENCE:

- 8+ years of experience within the software engineering industry, including as an IC and engineering manager with 5+ years managing engineers.

- Strong technical background and analytical abilities.

- Experience in developing commercially successful web applications, at scale, using Ruby on Rails. Others like React, Next.js, Astro, GraphQL, and modern JavaScript languages like TypeScript, are nice to have.

- Experience engaging in knowledgeable discussions about systems architecture, data flows, and data structures specifically a long standing Ruby on Rails application.

- Experience working in a fast paced company navigating ambiguity.

- Strong background in project management, with a proven track record of managing and delivering complex engineering projects at scale and on time.

- Past coding experience on consumer focused teams.

- Strong problem solving and decision making abilities.

- Strong organizational and time management skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience in Cloud based technologies like AWS.

- Experience in scrum and sprint processes.

- Ability to work in a fast-paced and dynamic environment.

- Commitment to continuous learning and professional development.

WHERE:

- This role will be remote (based in the U.S.).

- We believe great work can be done anywhere. No matter where you are based, NerdWallet offers benefits and perks to support the physical, financial, and emoti