About the Role
As a Principal Engineering Manager, you’re the most senior engineering authority in your area and a practice-area lead for Multidots. You don’t just raise the bar on individual teams — you own the systems behind great engineering: how we hire, how we train, the standards we hold, and the architecture we build on.
You own solution architecture, drive our AI and product innovation, and represent Multidots as an engineering expert in client rooms and on stage. This is a role with real organizational leverage — and accountability for outcomes that include quality, utilization, and profitability.
WordPress is our core, but not our ceiling. As the publishing technology landscape shifts — headless and composable architectures, platforms like Sanity, and emerging tooling — you’ll be the one deciding where Multidots invests its engineering future, keeping us ahead rather than catching up.
What You’ll Own
Leadership & standards
- Set the performance bar for engineering and coach the managers below you. You’ll own pod outcomes and scorecards, and help other Engineering Managers become better leaders — your influence is felt through the teams you don’t directly run.
- Own how we hire and grow engineers as a system. You’ll design and maintain our interview process, training tracks, and capability roadmap — so that recruiting and developing great engineers is repeatable, not ad hoc.
- Define the technical direction and standards for the practice. You’ll set the engineering standards, the org-wide quality bar, and the architecture review gates that keep our work excellent as we scale.
Architecture & innovation
- Own solution architecture and the hardest technical decisions across multiple projects — the calls that determine whether a build is fast, scalable, and maintainable, or expensive to live with later.
- Own how AI reshapes our engineering practice. You’ll set the strategy for AI-augmented development, evaluate emerging tech, shape our internal tooling roadmap, and bring new capabilities into how every team works — keeping Multidots ahead of the curve.
Pre-sales & external voice
- Lead technical discovery and own proposal strategy on our most important pursuits — defining the solution and effort, driving the architecture narrative, and acting as the subject-matter expert (SME) in client pitches.
- Represent Multidots as an engineering voice in the wider world — speaking at WordCamp and other events, and being a credible technical face for the company with clients and the community.
Business impact
- Co-own engineering strategy alongside leadership, and carry real accountability for department-level outcomes — quality, utilization, and profitability — because engineering excellence and business health are the same conversation at this level.
Technical Expertise We Expect
- Authoritative WordPress architecture at scale — you can own decisions across themes, plugins, headless setups, multisite, and complex integrations end to end.
- Platform-level mastery of performance and reliability: caching strategy, database optimization, scalability, and Core Web Vitals as architectural concerns, not afterthoughts.
- You define the security and quality standards — hardening, secure coding, testing, and review gates — that the rest of engineering follows.
- Hands-on credibility with enterprise hosting and tooling (e.g. Pantheon, WP Engine), CI/CD, containerization, and emerging AI engineering workflows.
What Success Looks Like
Within your first year, the systems you own — hiring, standards, architecture review — are raising the quality bar across teams, you’re trusted in the highest-stakes client conversations, and engineering is measurably healthier on the metrics that matter to the business.
What We’re Looking For
- 12+ years in engineering with proven influence well beyond a single team.
- Authoritative WordPress and architecture expertise — able to own decisions end to end.
- A track record of defining standards, hiring frameworks, and training systems at org level.
- A strong client-facing presence and experience driving AI and product innovation.
- Comfort being accountable for business outcomes, including profitability.
- The technical foresight to lead beyond WordPress — evaluating headless, composable, and adjacent platforms (e.g. Sanity) and guiding where the practice invests next.
Nice to Have
- An established external profile — WordCamp or conference speaking, open-source contributions, or published technical content.
- Deep platform architecture experience: enterprise multisite networks, large-scale migrations, headless ecosystems, and high-availability hosting (e.g. Pantheon, WP Engine).
- A point of view on the future of AI in software engineering — and experience defining how AI-augmented development is adopted responsibly across teams.
- Experience shaping engineering org design, leveling frameworks, and the standards and review processes that scale a practice.
