Engineering Manager, Developer Experience

Smartcar is on a mission to simplify how people securely connect their favorite apps and services to their cars. We build developer-friendly vehicle APIs so businesses can use a single integration to make their products available to cars across brands.

Founded in 2015, Smartcar has raised $36M from Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and Energize Capital. We are now the leading developer platform for mobility businesses across North America and Europe, serving amazing customers such as Uber, Turo, NRG, Uplight, Emovis, and AutoNation.

Innovative mobility companies use our API platform to manage EV charging, verify mileage, issue digital car keys, monitor fleets, and much more.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Developer Experience Engineering Team and drive the technical strategy, execution, and operational excellence of this critical function. You will play a pivotal role in ensuring our platform’s success by building world-class developer tools, SDKs, and documentation to create a seamless integration experience for our customers.

As the leader of the Developer Experience Engineering Team, you will foster a high-performing team culture, deliver intuitive and reliable developer-facing solutions, and collaborate closely with cross-functional leaders to align engineering initiatives with business objectives.

This role is remote within the United States. We’d love for you to join us!

Feel free to check out what our interview process looks like.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage the Developer Experience Engineering Team, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and technical excellence.
• Mentor engineers to ensure professional growth and technical skill development.
• Drive hiring efforts to build a diverse and high-performing team.
• Oversee the design, development, and maintenance of developer-facing tools, SDKs, and API documentation to improve the onboarding and integration experience.
• Provide architectural guidance to ensure that developer experience solutions are scalable, maintainable, and reliable.
• Champion best practices for API usability, authentication flows, and developer support tooling.
• Drive the development of robust data delivery mechanisms, including webhook-based and asynchronous integration strategies, beyond traditional REST APIs.
• Ensure the platform supports scalable event-driven architectures and streaming solutions for efficient data dissemination.
• Partner with engineering, product management, support, and other cross-functional teams to define and execute the technical strategy for developer experience improvements.
• Collaborate with product management to prioritize team efforts and align with company objectives.
• Establish and improve engineering processes, development workflows, and best practices to enhance productivity and reliability.
• Drive initiatives to enhance API usability, reducing friction for developers and improving time to value.
• Provide disciplined guidance and direction for incident management and on-call responsibilities related to developer experience systems.
• Optimize and refine webhook and asynchronous messaging reliability, ensuring robust data delivery with retries, monitoring, and failover mechanisms.
• Act as an advocate for developers integrating with the Smartcar platform, ensuring their needs are considered in technical decisions.
• Collaborate with technical writers and the product team to deliver world-class documentation and onboarding resources.
• Gather and analyze feedback from developers to continuously refine and enhance the integration experience.
• Work closely with the Core API, OEM Integration and Architecture and Platform Engineering teams to ensure seamless integration and consistency across the platform.
• Partner with marketing and customer success teams to support developer engagement initiatives, including tutorials, sample apps, and technical content.
• Collaborate with Finance and RevOps to ensure usage based reporting functionality meets customers billing needs.

Who You Are

• 5+ years of experience managing engineering teams, with a proven ability to lead and inspire.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a deep understanding of developer tooling, SDKs, APIs, and event-driven architectures.
• Strong track record of fostering a collaborative and high-performing team environment.
• Experience leading and managing remote teams and a mix of employee and contractor/offshore teams.
• Experience designing and maintaining developer-facing tools, libraries, and documentation.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, or similar, and familiarity with cloud platforms like AWS.
• Expertise in building and maintaining webhook-based integrations, event-driven workflows, and asynchronous messaging systems beyond REST APIs.
• Strong understanding of data streaming technologies, including Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar event-based architectures.
• Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across teams and influence stakeholders.
• Experience working closely with executive leadership to align technical direction with business priorities.
• A passion for delivering seamless experiences for developers integrating with the platform.
• Experience engaging with developer communities and gathering feedback to improve developer and vehicle owner experiences.

Bonus

• Experience with API design best practices and usability testing for developer tools.
• Knowledge of event-based architectures (e.g., Kinesis, Kafka, RabbitMQ) and RESTful APIs.
• Background in high-growth B2B SaaS companies.
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and modern development practices

Manager

• Angie Shields, Director of Experience Engineering

Your Team

• Allison Chen
• Kayleigh Foley
• Naomi Perez
• Tae Lee
• Thach Do

Compensation and Benefits Package

• Base salary determined by years of experience: $180,000 - $205,000.
• Equity.
• Remote work within the United States.
• Health, Dental and Vision covered at 90% for all plans and 80% coverage for dependents, which amounts to approximately 11 thousand dollars a year.
• 401K matching at 4%.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Wellness stipend of $50 a month.
• Cell phone and Internet stipend of $50 a month.
• $300 yearly learning and development stipend.
• $350 work-from-home stipend.
• 8 weeks of 100% paid parental leave with an additional 4 weeks unpaid, 1-week half day ramp back time and a 5 week Factor subscription.
• 10 days of paid bereavement leave.

Expected Hours

• You are free to work standard work hours for your time zone. One important note: Most of the team is based on the west coast therefore please expect to be available between the hours of 9AM and 4PM PT for outreach or meetings. We will do our best to ensure meetings are not late in your evening, but will not always be able to do so

Sponsorship

• We do not currently support any new sponsorship opportunities or sponsorship transfers for this role

Recruiter For This Role

• Mathilde Patmon

Smartcar is an equal opportunity employer. If you require accommodations for a disability or special need during the interview process, please contact us at [email protected]. We're here to ensure your comfort and provide reasonable support.