Software Engineering Manager

Notion Press is India's largest book publishing platform with over 180,000 books published and sold in 150+ countries. We are a 14-year-old platform and currently publish a new book every 27 minutes. Notion Press is a global platform for anyone who believes in the power of words and the impact it can have on the world we live in. Our vision is to democratize publishing and help writers to publish and sell their books directly to readers around the world. We are a 240+ strong team currently operating in India, Singapore, Malaysia ,and UAE

About the Role:

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to own the delivery engine of our product. You'll run the team day to day — people, process, and deadlines — reporting to the CTO and CEO. The CTO owns technical vision, architecture direction, and new-product R&D you own getting the right things shipped, on time, with a motivated team.

This is a leadership hire, not a senior IC role. The single most important thing you'll do is take a capable engineering team and make it predictable. You're hands-on enough to earn the team's respect technically, but your core job is delivery, people, and process — not out-engineering the founders.

If you've run engineering teams in a product company, modernized real legacy systems without burning them down, and want a mandate where the buck for delivery genuinely stops with you, this is for you.

Decision Rights

You own — and are accountable for:

• Delivery and deadlines. Sprint planning, prioritization, predictable shipping.
• People. Hiring, retention, performance management, 1:1s, growth paths, and managing people up or out when needed.
• Process. Engineering rhythm: standups, reviews, release process, on-call, quality gates - sized for the team, not bureaucracy for its own sake.
• Day-to-day technical execution. Code and architecture reviews, unblocking the team, and sound technical calls within the direction set by the CTO.

The CTO owns:

• Long-term technical vision and architecture direction
• New-product and R&D bets
• Final say on major architectural decisions

Your're a Strong Fit if you Have:

• 8+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years leading teams in a product company. You've run a team of roughly 10–30 and shipped on deadlines.
• A concrete delivery record: you can point to shipped X with a team of N by date Y, not just describe a philosophy.
• Real people-management depth: you've hired well, retained good people, run honest performance conversations, and managed someone out when it was the right call.
• Enough technical credibility to lead senior engineers. You don't need to be the deepest engineer in the room, but you can follow an architecture discussion, ask sharp questions, sanity-check estimates and tradeoffs, and can't be bluffed. Senior engineers should respect your judgment, even if they go deeper than you on the code.
• Legacy-system maturity. You've led teams working on existing production codebases and modernized them incrementally rather than insisting everything be greenfield. You won't try to out-engineer the founders or demand a rewrite to feel comfortable.
• Low ego, high ownership. You're energized by being the operational engine alongside technical founders, and you take full accountability for delivery.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in a startup or scale-up where you built process from scratch
• Familiarity with our domain (publishing / content / SaaS)
• A track record of growing senior ICs into team leads

Our Technical Environment:

You'll be leading the team that builds and runs our platform. You don't need deep expertise in all of this, but you should be comfortable enough to lead engineers who do, follow technical discussions, and make sound delivery calls.

• Backend: PHP / CodeIgniter
• Database: MySQL / relational data
• Frontend: JavaScript
• Infrastructure: AWS, with CI/CD pipelines
• AI/LLM features are an active and growing part of the product. So, comfort with how AI capabilities get built and shipped is a real plus

If you've managed teams on a PHP/MySQL/AWS stack and shipped reliably on it, you'll feel at home. If your background is a different stack but you've led legacy modernization and AI-feature delivery well, we still want to talk.

Benefits

What we Offer:

• A clearly defined leadership mandate with real authority over the team
• Direct partnership with the founders
• Competitive cash compensation.
• Other Benefits - Employee Stock Options, Paid Time Off for Annual Vacations and Healthcare Insurance