About Planning Center

Planning Center, established in 2006, has grown to support over 85,000 churches worldwide. As an independent company, we pride ourselves on being debt-free with no outside investors. Churches use our tools to communicate and connect with their congregations, organize information, and coordinate events. We’re committed to building great products that solve real problems using web and mobile products.

Our team enjoys the flexibility of remote work, utilizing tools like Asana, Slack, Notion, and Zoom for collaboration. We gather quarterly at our main office in Carlsbad, CA, fostering our work relationships.

About the Work

At Planning Center, the Engineering Manager (EM) plays a vital role in leading a collaborative and high-performing team of software developers. Our teams are purposefully small, focusing on a unifying vision—whether it’s a product or concept—and regularly delivering valuable features to our customers.

As the EM of Trust & Safety, you’ll cultivate a healthy team environment grounded in autonomy and trust, empowering team members to deliver software effectively and contribute meaningfully to our mission. You will have the opportunity to make a lasting impact on Planning Center's Trust & Safety architecture, leading a talented team as you collaborate to prevent fraud and enhance the security of our authentication and billing systems.

Responsibilities

Love Our Team: Build and Maintain a Healthy Team

• Create a welcoming and collaborative team environment by sharing ideas, working with other teams and departments, and allowing for personal connections, especially in a remote setting.
• Ensure a healthy work-life balance by establishing practical project scopes and deadlines.
• Set clear expectations and support developers in owning their work, providing guidance and resources as needed.
• Address performance issues constructively, supporting developers to improve or, if necessary, managing them out, with guidance and assistance from the Senior Engineering Manager (SEM).
• Partner with developers to help them grow their careers by providing individualized attention in 1:1 sessions and other settings to guide their skill development and goal-setting.
• Manage the administrative tasks that come with leading a team.

Love Our Code: Ensure a Healthy Codebase

• Lead the team to enforce code quality best practices through regular PR reviews, testing, and thorough documentation.
• Focus on making measurable improvements to the codebase to enhance maintainability and performance.
• Align technical priorities with product goals, emphasizing technical debt management and readiness for innovation.
• Advocate for new technologies and practices to boost efficiency and drive innovation.
• Stay informed about team incidents, ensure proper on-call coverage, and conduct postmortems when necessary.
• Collaborate with the team on architectural decisions, code reviews, pull requests, and other tasks.
• Implement, monitor, and optimize measures to guide the team's activities toward healthy and sustainable code.

Love Our Product: Partner with Product to Ship Top-Priority Features

• Partner with Product Managers to deliver top-priority features
• Assign projects to team members and plan work in a way that maintains a good pace and avoids burnout.
• Balance competing priorities and make tough decisions about resource allocation and project focus
• Facilitate cycle planning, cycle retrospectives, and other meetings to improve team processes.
• Manage uncertainty and change, adapting to shifting project scopes and unexpected challenges.
• Align with stakeholders to set priorities, deadlines, and resource needs for successful project delivery.

Who We Look For

The best fits for any role on the Planning Center team are people embodying our Core Values:

•  Engage with Humility - We actively participate with openness and receptiveness. We are ready to listen, learn, and speak thoughtfully and kindly—regardless of skill level, expertise, or place on the org chart.
•  Invest in our team - We give our time and energy to our team’s success—improving collaboration with effective communication, making space for diverse perspectives, sharing knowledge, and asking questions.
•  Do Our Best Work - We aspire to do our best possible work—continually looking for ways to improve the quality of our individual output and contribute to our team's overall success and growth.
•  Focus on Customer Impact - We advocate for our customer’s best interests in our decision-making—we can trace the goal of every project back to creating positive value for our customers.
•  Think Holistically, Work Iteratively - We focus on taking practical steps towards our goals with an awareness of the broader context—thinking big, working small.

We believe the strongest teams comprise people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, and we are committed to cultivating that diversity here at Planning Center. We're building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do your best work.

The Hiring Process

During the hiring process, you’ll have a chance to interact with several team members. We strongly encourage you to bring questions to each stage of the interview process. You’re interviewing us as much as we’re interviewing you.
 

Applications will be accepted until June 23, 2025 at 9amPST.

Below is an outline of our hiring process.

• Step One: Apply with a resume and cover letter. Your cover letter should speak directly to your interest in this position. Here are a few things we’d like you to include:
• • Describe how your experience has prepared you for success in this role.
  • Describe a frustrating leadership experience and what you wish had been done differently.
  • Describe a surprisingly delightful management experience and what made it a success.
    
    Note: While we embrace the use of AI tools at Planning Center and see them as a valuable part of modern work, we kindly ask that you write your cover letter in your own voice. Whether or not you use tools to help get started, we're hoping the final result reflects your personal communication style and interest in the role.
     
• Step Two: We'll provide you with a take-home assessment to mine insights into how you work through tricky situations and use your past experience to address issues.
• Step Three:  Product & Engineering Conversation- You’ll meet with our Sr. Engineering Manager and Product Manager from Trust & Safety so we can learn how you approach cross-functional collaboration and building with care.
• Step Four: Technical Interview with several members of the team (we'll discuss your work experience, methodologies, and you can ask any lingering questions you have about us).
• Step Five:  Career and Technical Leadership Interview- We'll review your submission and talk shop concerning management and shepherding fellow engineers. We will thoroughly review your career history, exploring your past working experiences and leadership style.
• Step Six: Pending all goes well, an offer will be extended.
   

Requirements

1. Reside in the United States
2. Eligible to work in the United States (we are currently unable to offer employment to those with H-1B visas)
3. Be willing to travel four times each year to connect with the rest of the team (not during a pandemic)
4. A minimum of 5 years developer experience
5. A minimum of 1 year of leadership and/or management experience
6. Experience in Ruby on Rails and React.

Benefits

We love our team. It’s one of the core pillars we work off of every day, which is why we take care of you as best we can. Here are a few highlights, but you can find all our benefits here.

Get paid: We pay competitive rates no matter where you live, contribute to your 401k, provide a charitable giving match of up to $2,000 a year, have a generous allowance for continued education, and offer a co-working stipend. The annual salary range for this position is $190,700 – $211,800.

Be healthy: Generous paid sick time and vacation time, $200 a month for physical fitness and mental health, 95% medical & 100% dental premium health coverage.

Get out: Paid Fridays off in the summer, every other Friday off the rest of the year, a month-long sabbatical every five years, one week off between Christmas & New Year, one week off a year to serve with a globally-focused non-profit, and two weeks paid vacation a year increasing to three over time.