Project management systems today are great at letting companies record their tasks, but place all of the burden on human project coordinators. These tools don’t know about the team’s time and resources and don’t have any intelligence — someone has to manually match tasks against their assumptions about the team’s capacity. Not only does this process waste precious company resources, it’s also error-prone and leads to overwork, missed deadlines, miscommunication, and micromanagement.

Motion is building the world’s most advanced project management system — one that doesn’t require a project coordinator manually tracking each task, but rather an intelligent system that can make sense of hundreds of tasks across dozens of projects and automatically coordinate them across every person on the team. Motion allows companies to focus on the work they need to do rather than wasting up to 50% of their resources on overhead.

Our users give us data on their workload (e.g. projects and tasks) and resources (employee roles, calendars, and schedules). Based on all this information, Motion makes intelligent decisions about how tasks should be executed — better than any human project coordinator. Teams that use Motion know what people are working on at any given time, when each task will be completed, and whether any tasks will fall behind schedule. The moment something changes, instead of the coordinator having to figure out all the cascading effects, Motion instantly creates a new optimized plan for the team.

Motion is the project management system of the future. We are growing extremely quickly, trusted by thousands of customers, have millions in revenue, near-infinite runway, and an exceptionally talented team.

Location: North America (remote)

Compensation: $175k-$250k base salary (depending on experience level), plus equity compensation

About the Hiring Manager

I’m Chander, Head of Engineering here at Motion. Prior to Motion I’ve worked at many startups and some bigger companies like Twitter and Stripe. I’m a dabbler and frequent blogger who likes trying out new technologies.

I hate being told something is impossible. The role of technology, over the long term, is to solve the need for tradeoffs. In the short term, it’s just a question of which tradeoff do we prefer, as we eventually work towards the long term solution

I love people who tell me why I’m wrong. Seriously. You’re never going to offend me, so just be blunt. On the flip side, I will get upset if you didn’t agree with the idea but didn’t tell me at the time and just kept it to yourself. This pattern leads to half-hearted commitment

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about culture. For example, you may have seen the communication guidelines doc I wrote. I expect my EMs, as leaders of the company, to be shining examples of Motion culture.

I prefer technical EMs. You don’t have to be the strongest coder, but you have to know enough to understand the reality of what your reports are dealing with and push back (in either direction) where appropriate

Lastly, you should have a good track record of leveling up and coaching your reports. Finding good people is only half the job; it’s our responsibility to coach them up

Something I’m working on is getting better at telling people when they do a good job, not just when something goes wrong. Historically, I operate with the Rule of Success, and I’m actively working to change this

About The Role

I’m hiring an Engineering Manager who can lead and elevate a team of talented engineers, make key technical decisions, and deliver high-impact projects that help Motion scale the next 2 orders of magnitude. This role is about helping Motion tackle its highest-impact challenges while fostering an incredible team culture.

We work hard to ensure Motion’s engineering team is one of the most talented teams in the world. We’ve accomplished in weeks what takes most teams months and tackled projects others would consider impossible. As an Engineering Manager, you’ll lead some of Motion’s most important work, driving results while building an incredible team.

You will be a successful Engineering Manager at Motion if:

You are ambitious and always looking for ways to improve. For most employees at Motion, this role will give you the most responsibilities you’ve ever had, while holding you to higher standards than other companies you’ve worked at. Don’t rest on your past achievements — expect to work your hardest and do the best work of your career at Motion. You will receive lots of coaching and feedback

You can take ownership of projects and lead them to completion while dealing with ambiguity and finding the right balance between speed and quality. You don’t need every detail and edge case spelled out for you because you can figure out the goals of the project and fill in the blanks

You have a strong understanding of how you can create the most impact, and don’t get lost in the weeds in details that don’t matter. You’re excited to work on whatever solves the biggest customer problems, not just the coolest technical challenges

You can elevate the team. You hold yourself and your team to high standards for technical quality, help them navigate trade-offs, and make sure we’re building something that lasts. You attract and grow top-tier engineers, build a culture where people thrive, and create an environment where everyone can do the best work of their careers.

You stay hands-on with engineering. Part of your time will be contributing high-quality code to our code base. You believe that staying close to the ground truth is essential for making the best technical decisions and earning the respect of your team

You can guide the team to deliver. You help your team ship bug-free product quickly while making smart technical decisions. You find the right balance between speed and quality and keep everyone focused on the most impactful work

You thrive in ambiguity. Not every problem is perfectly defined. You can figure out what matters, bring clarity to your team, and help them ship the right solutions

Technology Stack

We prefer candidates who are familiar with the Javascript ecosystem and can hit the ground running when they join us. We don’t expect you to know all of our technologies, but enough of them to pick up the rest quickly. Our tech stack: Typescript, Node.js, React, React Query, Nest.js, Postgres, Temporal.