Engineering Manager- Media

Join Outside’s Media business as an Engineering Manager for the engineering team! You will manage a group of engineers responsible for unifying our content platforms and creating new digital experiences to inspire users to get outside. From the way people engage with our content through to the underlying systems that power it, this team is tasked with delivering high-quality products that delight our loyal audience and serve diverse business needs across our monetization stack (subscriptions, advertising, affiliate). 

The primary stack these teams work with includes PHP, React, NextJS, and an Apollo federated graph. As a leader, your primary role is to put the goals of our customers and business first, drive product and architecture decisions with your product and design counterparts, and help your team reach its maximum potential. You'll work closely with engineering leaders within the Media team and across our Consumer Apps group to set technical strategy and direction. Your core responsibility will be focused on strategic alignment and managing a team of engineers, your skillset should also be sound in architecture, feature development, and code review. 

What You Will Do

• Lead and mentor a high-performing, inclusive engineering team through strong relationships, regular 1:1s, and clear career goal setting
• Architect and develop critical features for our media platform, directly impacting user experience across millions of active users.
• Guide the team in building and maintaining modern web applications using PHP and React within a WordPress ecosystem (including headless WordPress with GraphQL)
• Establish and optimize the processes for the full feature lifecycle (design, implementation, testing, deployment) enabling the team to build reliable, automated systems and focus on the next high-impact problem.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, data, customer support, and other engineering teams to unblock their roadmaps while maintaining the integrity of our foundational systems. Drive alignment across teams on critical dependencies, technical direction, and roadmap priorities—this is as important as shipping features yourself.
• Prioritize work based on company revenue needs and long-term platform health.
• Drive continuous improvement by identifying performance bottlenecks, optimizing build pipelines, and proactively surfacing reliability issues before they impact users. Approach each challenge with curiosity—dig into why systems fail and how to prevent future incidents.

What We’re Looking For

• 3+ years of people leadership experience
• 7+ years of web application development experience
• Experience leading remote or distributed teams
• Strong background in React, Next, PHP and modern web architectures
• Comfortable operating across the full stack and making pragmatic architectural decisions

Who You Are

• You thrive in a high-trust, high-autonomy, fast-paced environment and are self-motivated to push for impact.
• You’re an excellent communicator, including the ability to translate complex technical challenges or opportunities to non-technical stakeholders.
• You channel your strong organizational and analytical skills to manage an execution-focused and customer-driven team.
• You assume positive intent in your teammates and approach disagreements with curiosity rather than defensiveness.
• You're particularly skilled at building consensus across teams with competing priorities and ensuring alignment on technical decisions.
• You're excited about AI-assisted development and how it can accelerate team velocity. You understand that tooling is leverage, not a shortcut—you hold yourself and your team accountable for outcomes, not just activity.
• You work in the open—sharing knowledge, writing clear documentation, and helping teammates grow through code review and pairing—to foster a positive culture of collaboration and continuous learning.
• You're committed to continuous improvement: proactively identifying technical debt, optimizing for developer experience, and ensuring smooth feature rollouts.

Nice to Have

• Experience building high-performance headless CMS or micro-frontend architectures
• Experience with React, Next.js, and GraphQL APIs
• Experience working in AWS and/or Vercel
• Track record of reducing incident response time or improving system reliability metrics

What We Offer:

Entirely remote jobs that could be performed in Colorado: Employees can expect to be paid a salary of between $150,000 to $180,000. Additional benefits include health care, vision, dental, retirement, Flexible Time Away,  sick leave, and more.  This salary range is merely an estimate and may vary based on an applicant’s location, market data/ranges, an applicant’s skills and prior relevant experience, certain degrees and certifications, and other relevant factors