Engineering Manager (Upcoming Apps Portfolio & VPN) (Remote)

Who We Are ( Mode.Inc )

Mode.Inc is the parent company of a portfolio of technology businesses, including Mode Mobile, the creator of EarnOS, a transformational software platform that turns ordinary smartphones into "EarnPhones". This innovation empowers users worldwide to monetize everyday mobile activities such as streaming, gaming, and shopping. We enable users to profit from their data and attention, rather than letting only tech giants benefit. What sets us apart is our inclusive approach, converting users into earners, facilitating over $150M in earnings and savings, and going a step further by turning earners into owners by awarding stock ownership in Mode.Inc based on their usage. We have attracted over 40 million users across 170 countries.

Mode Mobile, Inc. Ranked Number 1 Fastest Growing Company in North America on the 2023 Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

For additional insights, check out information about our reward-based super app, Mode Earn App, which also powers the reward engine for our proprietary smartphone, Mode Earn Phone.

Our Team and Culture Drive Our Success

Our team is the heart of our culture. We value innovation, collaboration, and curiosity, with a passion for getting things done. We strive to hire and cultivate the best team members and foster a culture of open communication and transparency. We are driven and hard-working but also committed to having fun along the way. We allow OKRs to guide us, assume positive intent, sometimes agree to disagree and commit, honor our commitments, seek to accomplish more with less, and encourage everyone to speak up as our team owns our company’s success.

You can read more about our team and how we work here .

The Role

Mode Mobile is looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead the engineering team taking ownership of a VPN product following its acquisition, and to become a technical leader for future acquired products.

This role sits at the intersection of engineering leadership, product ownership, and technical acquisition integration. You will take unfamiliar, live products from acquisition through transition, stabilization, integration, and ongoing growth.

We are a user-facing product-led team, and we are looking for someone who is passionate about turning acquired products into thriving, well-run businesses.

This is a player-coach role. Initially you will be hands-on with development and operations alongside your engineers: reviewing and writing code, closing knowledge gaps left by the previous team, and making the architectural and prioritization calls that come with inheriting a live product. As the team grows and the transition stabilizes, your focus will shift toward people leadership, delivery management, and building a repeatable playbook for onboarding future acquisitions.

You’ll work closely with the VP of Engineering, Product Managers, other Engineering Managers, Corporate development, Marketing, Operations, and several stakeholders to define and execute according to our strategic roadmap to accelerate our future growth.

Who You Are and What You’ll Do

You are passionate about giving people private, secure, and unrestricted access to the internet, and about helping users get more value from their smartphones. You care about your users and your team in equal measure.

You are a strong engineer who chose to lead: you can still read a Kotlin, Swift, or Go pull request critically, debug a production incident, and make sound architecture decisions, and you enjoy stepping in when the team needs it.

Acquisition and Integration

Lead technical onboarding of acquired products from due diligence through transition and steady-state ownership.

Assess inherited architecture, infrastructure, security, vendors, operational risks, and technical debt.

Establish knowledge transfer and ensure critical operational knowledge is documented.

Define and execute the transition plan with the acquired team and Mode stakeholders.

Build and continuously improve a repeatable engineering acquisition playbook.

You are comfortable operating with incomplete information. Acquired products rarely come with perfect documentation, clean architecture, or complete ownership records. You know how to establish the facts quickly, identify the highest risks, and make pragmatic decisions without waiting for perfect information.

You build teams: you hire, onboard, coach, and grow engineers, run effective 1:1s, give candid feedback, and create a culture of ownership, testing, and continuous delivery.

You embrace agentic AI as a force multiplier for your team: you use AI coding agents yourself for code, investigation, and documentation, and you set the standards and workflows for how your engineers use them safely and productively.

You value working closely with Product Management, learning directly from users about what matters to them, and developing solutions that they love.

You run delivery well: 2-week sprints, clear OKRs, sensible estimation, and honest status reporting up to leadership, with a bias toward finding minimal ways to test hypotheses and validate feasibility.

You’re a strong advocate for unit/integration testing, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and continuously shipping to production, and you will establish them where they don’t exist yet.

You are security- and compliance-minded: secrets management, encryption, key handling, user privacy, and regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2 are part of how you run a team that operates a privacy product.

What You Bring to the Team

Must Have:

8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years managing engineers as a people manager or hands-on tech lead/manager in an agile environment delivering consumer products to end-users.

Strong hands-on technical background, with deep expertise in at least one of our core areas and enough breadth to work effectively across the stack. Experience in two or more of the following is a strong plus:

Native mobile: Android (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose) and/or iOS (Swift, UIKit/SwiftUI), including app store release management

Backend services in Go (preferred), Python, or Node.js, with PostgreSQL and AWS (Lambda, S3, RDS)

Infrastructure and DevOps: Terraform, Ansible, Docker, multi-cloud/multi-provider hosting, Datadog or similar observability

Networking and VPN fundamentals: WireGuard, Shadowsocks or similar, DNS, TLS, and how mobile VPN clients and servers fit together

Experience leading or being a key contributor in a technical acquisition, migration, or takeover of a live product: due diligence, transition planning, knowledge transfer, and integration into a parent organization.

A track record of raising engineering quality on an inherited system: introducing automated testing, CI/CD, code review, documentation, and security hardening without stopping feature delivery.

Agentic AI proficiency: Strong practical experience using AI coding agents and other AI tools for software development, investigation, testing, and documentation, with an understanding of how to use them safely and effectively within an engineering team.

You’re a candid and empathetic communicator that is excited to join a startup that enjoys leveling up a company, and you are comfortable communicating status, risks, and trade-offs to executives.

You have exceptional organizational and analytical skills leading to confident independent delivery, but know when and how to include others.

You have experience building and operating large-scale systems and have led technical direction for a team.

Passionate about Technology and keeping up to date with latest advancements, techniques and best practices.

Alignment with our Core Values:

​​Accountable: You take ownership of your responsibilities, demonstrating trustworthiness and self-discipline. You are consistent in your work, transparent in your actions, and communicate effectively. You follo