Engineering Leader, US

At Linear, we are on a mission to bring magic back to software. To empower product teams to do their best work, we are building an issue tracking and project management tool that combines UI elegance with world-class performance. Founded in 2019, Linear has become the platform of choice for 20,000+ companies to plan and build their products.

Linear was set up as a fully remote company from the start. Today, our small but mighty team is distributed across North America and Europe. What unites us is relentless focus, fast execution, and our passion for software craftsmanship. We are all makers at heart and care deeply about the quality of our work.

As a small, senior team, we move quickly, operate with high ownership, and constantly take on new challenges. We’re looking for an engineering leader who thrives in a hands-on environment and can guide a highly experienced group of ICs toward clarity, quality, and impact. This role goes beyond a typical Engineering Management position: you’ll help shape the direction of the US engineering organization, influence product strategy, and define how engineering leadership operates at Linear as we scale.

You’ll support engineers in their growth, elevate product quality through strong technical leadership, and drive both product and organizational decisions. You’ll work closely with founders, design, and product teams to determine what to build, how to build it, and who builds it, including across our AI-focused initiatives.

We don’t expect you to have a background in everything we use, but we do expect strong technical acumen, exceptional communication, and a track record of leading senior, high-performing product engineering teams through ambiguity and scale. We're looking for builders who still know how to code even if it's not part of the day-to-day.

Please note: We are an equal opportunity employer and remote-only company. At this time, we can only support hiring within North America for this role.

What you'll do

- Lead and develop a senior, fast-moving engineering team, providing clear direction, high-quality feedback, mentorship, and coaching

- Drive technical and product direction in partnership with design, product, founders, and senior leadership, shaping the roadmap, making high impact architectural decisions, and influencing cross-functional strategy

- Own planning and execution across projects while helping engineers stay unblocked, focused, and aligned

- Ensure code quality, architectural integrity, and operational excellence across systems

- Advocate for and contribute to a strong engineering culture centered on ownership, curiosity, impact, and high standards

- Help define and evolve our engineering practices, hiring bar, and team structure as we scale—owning significant parts of the US engineering org over time

- Play a key role in growing the team, shaping org design, and developing future tech leads

- Partner with the Head of Engineering to build the processes, expectations, and culture that enable Linear’s next stage of growth

Our tech

- Pluggable agentic workload system utilizing temporal, operating at production scale

- Proprietary websocket data sync framework built for speed and offline support

- React, MobX, styled-components on the frontend

- Extensive, widely used, GraphQL API and SDK

- Node, Postgres, Temporal, and Redis in the backend

- Hosted on Google Cloud with k8s

- GitHub, Slack, Notion

What we offer

- Interesting and challenging work

- Work-life balance

- Competitive salary and equity

- Employee-friendly equity terms (early exercise, extended exercise)

- Paid lunch and coffee during workdays

- Work remotely, no commuting to the office

- Paid co-working space/desk at an office

- Health, dental, and vision insurance (US)

- Regular team events and off-sites

- 5 weeks of paid vacation

- 4 months of paid parental leave

Learn how we think and work

- A story about our mission: Read Me https://linear.app/readme

- How we work: Designing remote work at Linear https://linear.app/now/designing-remote-work-at-linear

- Building our teams: Why and how we do work trials at Linear https://linear.app/blog/why-and-how-we-do-work-trials-at-linear

- Crafting quality that endures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCil7YNhNCU Config keynote by our Co-founder & CEO, Karri Saarinen

- How we structure our product teams https://www.youtube.com/watch?index=59&list=PLXDU_eVOJTx402DljIPagaDKLibF-qfF0&v=I4vvBidQcck talk by our Head of Product, Nan Yu, at Config 2024

- Scaling our real-time sync engine https://linear.app/blog/scaling-the-linear-sync-engine talk by our cofounder, Tuomas Artman, at Linear's 2023 offsite

- First Round Capital: The Unsung Ingredient: Taste https://review.firstround.com/stripe-square-linear-product-taste/

- A video series: Conversations on Quality https://linear.app/quality

- Read about our recent Series C Fundraise https://linear.app/now/building-our-way and Giving our team liquidity https://linear.app/now/giving-our-team-liquidity-through-linear-s-first-tender-offer