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 three times a year 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 API, 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 core API infrastructure—a foundational system that powers both our own products and serves third-party developers. You'll guide the evolution of our real-time Message Bus and Webhooks infrastructure while exploring cutting-edge opportunities like building MCP servers that showcase our API's capabilities and shape our AI strategy. Leading this small, incredibly talented team, you'll collaborate to strengthen the technical foundation that enables Planning Center to serve churches worldwide.

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 October 6 at 8am PDT.

Below is an outline of our hiring process.

• Step One: Apply with a resume and submit answers to the application questions so we can get to know a little bit more about you and your experience.
• Step Two: We'll send you an assessment to complete at home to gauge your technical and management skills.
• Step Three: Initial phone screen with our Talent Acquisition Specialist to get to know one another and discuss work and culture.
• Step Four: Technical Interview- During this interview we’ll discuss your work experience, methodologies, and do a coding exercise to learn more about your experiences, plus leave time for any questions you’d like to ask.
• Step Five: Product & Engineering Conversation- You’ll meet with our Sr. Engineering Manager and one of our Product Managers so we can learn how you approach cross-functional collaboration and building with care.
• Step Six:  Career Focused Interview- We will thoroughly review your career history, exploring your past working experiences and leadership style.
• Step Seven: 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 $181,700 - $213,800.

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. In 2026, we will be moving to a full four day work week!