Job Description

Who We Are:

We’re a high-growth software company with a big mission empowering K-12 district teams to do more with less. 

At LINQ, we get K12. That’s why we help districts transform K-12 school operations with best-in-class, cloud-based software solutions built to help districts return more resources to classrooms. Integrating finance, HR, nutrition management, and payments into a single, secure platform, LINQ reduces administrative burden. LINQ is trusted by 30% of school districts across the U.S. to help them operate more efficiently and serve over 1 billion meals to 17 million students annually, process payroll for 364,000 educators, administrators, and staff, and engage with millions of families through the free LINQ Connect app.   

Our team? They’re talented, committed, and fiercely loyal problem-solvers. At LINQ, you’ll find challenging and meaningful work, a team that respects and uplifts one another, and a commitment to constant improvement. Our customers love us because we’re attentive, patient, communicative, and solutions focused. They know they can count on us to not only anticipate their needs but to deliver the right answer every time. 

LINQ’s Values:
• Act with Integrity & Build Trust: Trust is the foundation of our company. We operate with the highest standards of integrity, both internally and externally. We believe in transparency, honesty, and accountability. Building a culture where trust is earned and maintained.
• Deliver Excellence: We consistently exceed our clients’ expectations. In every interaction, we strive to anticipate needs, provide swift solutions, and go the extra mile to relentlessly impress our customers. We communicate clearly, consistently, and in a timely way to cultivate lasting relationships.
• Embrace Challenges: We embrace a growth mindset. Challenges offer opportunities to learn, grow, and improve. Continuous learning keeps us relevant and effective to ensure our solutions remain on the leading edge of innovation.
• Collaborate & Act as One Team: Diverse skills, ideas, and perspectives are our strength. Through open communication, shared goals, and a spirit of unity and mutual respect, we collaborate to achieve excellence, drive innovation, and propel our company forward as a cohesive force.

ABOUT THE TEAM

Our Payments team builds the platform that moves real money between school districts, families, and payment partners nationwide. Every transaction matters — a parent loading lunch money before the bell, a cafeteria terminal charging at the register, a nightly settlement landing in a district's bank account. Reliability, accuracy, and financial integrity aren't features - they're the floor. We're building the next generation of K-12 payments, giving districts confidence in their funds and families a seamless way to pay for what their students rely on every day.

ABOUT THE POSITION

As an Engineering Manager for Payments, you will lead the engineering team(s) that own the payment engine and admin tooling behind LINQ's payments platform - the software responsible for moving real money between school districts, families, and LINQ's payment partners. You'll partner closely with the Sr. Director of Engineering, senior engineers on your team, and Product leadership to ship software where reliability, data accuracy, and operational rigor are non-negotiable.

This is a player/coach role that leans firmly toward coach. Roughly 80% of your time is spent leading people - hiring, coaching, unblocking, raising the bar, and driving delivery - and the remaining time is spent where a manager's technical leverage is highest: architecture and design reviews, high-stakes code review, pairing on hard problems, and jumping into the code when production needs you. You're not here to pick up sprint tickets, but you are close enough to the code that your engineers trust your technical instincts and you can carry real weight during an incident - which matters more in payments than almost anywhere else.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• Lead and grow a team of engineers across a blended FTE/contractor model - running meaningful 1:1s, writing growth plans, managing performance honestly, and giving direct, kind, actionable feedback
• Own delivery outcomes for the Payments platform - partnering with Product to shape the work, not just receive it, and driving predictable, high-quality execution
• Partner with the Sr. Director of Engineering and your engineers to shape and execute the technical roadmap - balancing new product capabilities, infrastructure modernization, and platform reliability
• Keep operational excellence front and center - reconciliation, webhook resilience, retry and idempotency patterns, and data accuracy in the face of third-party outages are the baseline expectation, not a stretch goal
• Raise the hiring bar and own the hiring loop for your team - sourcing, interview calibration, and closing talent
• Contribute as a technical leader in ADRs, design reviews, and high-stakes code reviews; weigh in on tradeoffs with enough depth that your technical voice genuinely sharpens the work
• Drive healthy engineering practices - testing discipline, CI/CD, DORA/flow metrics, and incident response - using evidence to guide improvement rather than opinion alone
• Enable the team to adopt AI-assisted development tooling (Claude Code) effectively and responsibly, modeling the practices yourself
• Cultivate a culture where engineers are confident to change code - when people are afraid to touch something, we move slowly and we break things, and in payments that has a direct financial consequence
• Communicate up, across, and down clearly in writing - roadmaps, status, risks, tradeoffs, and decisions

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

Core Experience

• 3+ years managing software engineering teams, with a track record of shipping production software at quality
• Experience managing mixed FTE and contractor teams - with a clear sense of where those management approaches converge and diverge
• Strong technical background in Node.js and modern JavaScript/TypeScript service development; you've shipped real systems and are sharp enough to contribute credibly in design and code reviews
• Comfort with Angular or a close-adjacent modern front-end framework
• Hands-on experience leading teams that build payments, fintech, or other integration-heavy systems where data accuracy, idempotency, and reconciliation with external systems are core concerns
• Evidence-based management approach - familiar with DORA, SPACE, or equivalent frameworks, and honest about their limits

AWS & Cloud Architecture

• Production experience working in AWS environments; comfortable reasoning about container-based deployment (ECS/EKS), serverless services, and managed databases
• Experience leading teams through infrastructure modernization (e.g., containerization migrations) without disrupting delivery

Payments & Integration Domain

• Familiarity with payment gateway integrations, tokenization, settlement flows, and dispute/chargeback management
• Understanding of PCI DSS scope reduction strategies and the operational realities of relying on tokenization vendors
• Demonstrated experience hardening integrations with unreliable third-party systems - webhook handling, reconciliation jobs, eventual consistency, and graceful degradation

AI-Assisted Development

• Hands-on user of Claude Code, Cursor, or similar AI-assisted coding environments
• Able to coach a team on effective, responsible use of AI tooling — and honest about where it works and where it doesn't

Additional Requirements

• Coaching-first instinct - you default to asking before telling, and help people think clearly rather than thinking for them
• Direct communicator - you can challenge respectfully, escalate clearly, and write a crisp exec update
• Fluent in Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD practices

WHAT WILL MAKE YOU STAND OUT

• Experience in payments, payroll processing, fintech, or K-12 EdTech
• Background managing teams that operate high-transaction-volume, real-money-movement systems
• Experience running blended onshore/offshore or FTE/contractor engineering teams at scale
• Experience splitting or merging teams as organizational scope evolves
• Hands-on experience with terminal/EMV or in-person payment integrations
• Experience launching hosted checkout, embedded payments, or PSP-style products
• Contributions to engineering excellence programs, management communities of practice, or internal leadership development

Why You'll Love Working With Us

🌎Flex Your Workspace: Work remote from one of our eligible states across the US, or if you’re near Austin three days in office a week!

💰Planning Your Future: Our 401(k) plan comes with a 4% employer match on total earnings (not just your base salary).

💸Performance Pays Off: Whether it’s a company bonus or target sales commission, your hard work doesn’t go unnoticed.

🌴Vacation Your Way: Our flexible Open Paid Time Off Plan lets you take the time you need, when you need it.

👶Paid Parental Leave: Take the time you need to welcome your new addition – We’ve got you covered!

🎉Ten Paid Corporate Holidays: Enjoy a little extra downtime to relax and recharge with the ten paid holidays each year.

❤️Giving Back: Feel good while doing good – 16 paid volunteer hours to support the causes that matter most to you. #LINQCares

🏥Benefits That Have Your Back (And Teeth, Too!): Rock-solid medical, dental and vision coverage. Pick your vibe: a low deductible PPO and pair with an FSA or a HDHP with a sweet HSA – with contributions from LINQ. Dental perks that even cover braces for the kiddos.

💪Wellness Perks: Employer-paid Short-Term Disability, Long Term Disability, Basic Life, and AD&D insurance. Gym reimbursements and tons of extra savings on travel assistance, employee assistance, and even pet insurance options.

🎁Rewards For Referrals: Got an amazing candidate in your network? Send them our way and earn a referral bonus when they join the team!

EOE Statement/Accommodation Notice:

As a federal contractor and equal employment opportunity employer, LINQ adheres to all applicable laws and regulations regarding employment practices, ensuring that all qualified individuals receive consideration for employment

based on their qualifications. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, pregnancy, genetic information, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other protected category under applicable federal, state, and local law.

To learn more about your rights and protections under federal law, please refer to the EEOC Equal Employment Opportunity Poster at the following link: https://www.eeoc.gov/poster

If you’d like to view a copy of the company’sstate or federally required affirmative action plans or policy statement, please email HRHelp@linq.com If you are an individual with a disability and would like to request a reasonable accommodation as part of the employment selection process, please contact HRHelp@linq.com This email address is reserved solely for job seekers with disabilities requesting accessibility assistance or an accommodation in the job application process. Please do not use this email to inquire about the status of your job application if you do not require accessibility assistance or an accommodation. Messages left for other purposes, such as solicitation, following up on an application or non-disability related technical issues, will not receive a response.

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