Engineering Manager

Adventure is our Culture. Join a team that celebrates a lifestyle as bold as the terrain we love. At Backcountry, we are rooted in adventure, recognition, and wellbeing on and off the mountain. We spotlight employee stories, celebrate milestones, and offer exclusive outdoor perks. Whether you are at HQ, in a retail store, or remote, you will be part of a team that thrives on energy, exploration, and connection.   Reports to: Director of Engineering Location: Costa Rica   As our Engineering Manager, you will lead one of Backcountry's eCommerce engineering teams responsible for building, maintaining, and modernizing a platform that serves millions of outdoor enthusiasts. This role exists to provide the people leadership and technical oversight needed to accelerate delivery while raising the bar on reliability, performance, and code quality across our digital storefront. You will partner closely with Product, UX, and Architecture to translate strategy into execution, ensuring your team ships high-impact features predictably and with confidence. At six months, success looks like a high-trust team operating with healthy agile practices, measurable improvements in throughput and reliability, and a clear roadmap for addressing tech debt and modernization priorities. What you get to do:

People Leadership

Lead, coach, and develop a team of engineers; provide continuous feedback, career development support, and performance management.

Foster a culture of ownership, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.

Hire, onboard, and retain top engineering talent; build a high-trust, high-performance team.

Delivery & Execution

Own end-to-end delivery: scoping, planning, execution, release readiness, and post-release measurement and iteration.

Partner with Product to manage the team backlog, clarify requirements, define success metrics, and ensure the team is focused on the highest-value work.

Drive healthy agile practices (grooming, estimation, prioritization) and continuously improve predictability and throughput.

Technical Oversight

Provide technical direction and oversight: system design, architecture decisions, design reviews, and non- functional requirements (performance, scalability, security).

Maintain a strong technical skillset and contribute where appropriate (reviews, design, incident support, occasional hands-on contributions).

Champion simplification and modernization by identifying tech debt, legacy risks, and opportunities to improve maintainability and system efficiency.

Own reliability for the team's services: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and post-incident learning (RCA/postmortems).

Monitor system performance and proactively identify damage indicators before they become customer-impacting issues.

Ensure high-quality technical documentation (TRDs, diagrams, flowcharts, runbooks) and knowledge transfer to support scale and onboarding.

AI-Enabled Engineering

Establish team practices for safe and effective AI usage, including code review standards, security and privacy considerations, validation and testing expectations, and a trust-but-verify culture.

Encourage engineers to use AI tools to accelerate discovery and POCs, troubleshoot incidents, and reduce toil, while ensuring maintainable, secure, and well-tested outputs.

Required Qualifications Preferred Qualifications

Direct ownership of eCommerce core flows such as checkout, payments, or promotions at scale.

Experience managing or growing engineering teams in a Latin American or distributed remote context.

Prior exposure to a multi-brand or portfolio company engineering environment.

Familiarity with search, personalization, or catalog systems in a retail or marketplace setting.

Why Join

Impact & Visibility: You will lead a team directly shaping the eCommerce platform that connects millions of outdoor enthusiasts to the gear and knowledge they need — your decisions will show up in site performance, conversion, and customer experience metrics.

AI-First Skill Building: Get hands-on with the most advanced AI tools in the market. From automation to prompt engineering, you will build and model a modern engineering practice that sets your team apart.

Accelerated Career Path: High performers are quickly entrusted with greater responsibility, new challenges, and leadership opportunities across our portfolio of brands.

Competitive Benefits: Paid time off policies, locally competitive compensation, medical coverage, and employee discounts across our portfolio of brands.

Interview process:

Recruiter Screen: A member of our recruiting team will reach out to connect, share more about Backcountry and the Engineering Manager role, and learn about your background and goals.

AI or Technical Challenge: You will complete a short AI or problem-solving exercise so we can understand how you approach engineering decisions and delivery execution.

Hiring Manager Interview: A deep-dive conversation with the Director of Engineering focused on your leadership approach, technical judgment, and delivery track record.

In-Person / Panel Interview: Participate in structured interviews with Backcountry engineering and cross-functional leadership, exploring your experience in depth across people leadership, technical strategy, and operational excellence.

Reference Checks: Conducted in parallel with the final stages where possible.

Offer: We move quickly for the right candidate.