Engineering Manager II, Telematics Technology

About this role

The Opportunity We are looking for an Engineering Manager II to lead our Telematics Technology domain. In this role, you will manage the engineers who deploy, support, and operate the production systems that turn granular driving data into the risk signals that power Root's pricing and customer experience. You'll partner closely with Data Science, Pricing, Underwriting, and other stakeholders to set the strategy for the domain, while ensuring your engineering organization is healthy, growing, and delivering reliably. Our telematics strategy is centered on two key focus areas. First, the Telematics Platform focus area operates the telematics feature store, trip featurization pipelines, canonical data conversion, and the Telematics API. This is one of Root's founding capabilities, and stakeholder demand is growing as more teams depend on telematics data to make decisions. Second, the Telematics Experience focus area aims to unlock the full value of telematics throughout the insurance lifecycle, from first impression to late tenure. We are committed to building best-in-class customer-facing experiences that make telematics convenient and transparent for all our customers while maintaining an imperative to reward the safest drivers. As the Engineering Manager, you'll be accountable for the execution, delivery, technical direction, and people leadership across these focus areas. Salary Range : $168,000 - $220,000 (Eligible for competitive bonus and equity offering) Root is a “work where it works best” company. This means we will support you working in whatever location that works best for you across the US. How You Will Make an Impact Engineering Managers at Root lead at the intersection of technical strategy and people development. In this role, you will guide a multi-faceted domain that balances the rigor of high-scale sensor data pipelines with the user-centricity of customer-facing mobile experiences. Success depends on your ability to deliver reliable technical infrastructure that fuels our core insurance products, while simultaneously unlocking intuitive, transparent ways for our customers to interact with their driving data. Delivery & Execution: Partner with Data Science, Pricing, Underwriting, and other stakeholders to define the long-term vision and quarterly roadmaps for our Telematics Platform and Telematics Experience focus areas. Translate product and data strategy into actionable quarterly roadmaps, prioritizing technical investments to balance feature delivery with platform stability. People & Organizational Leadership: Manage and mentor a high-performing engineering organization, fostering an environment of mutual trust, open communication, high ownership, accountability, and continuous growth. Use a situational leadership approach—coaching, directive feedback, and delegation—to develop engineers at all levels. Identify talent gaps and drive recruitment, onboarding, and organizational design plans to ensure the domain scales with business demand. Operational & Technical Excellence: Guide the architectural direction for the telematics pipeline, ensuring our systems are built for high observability, reliability, and scale. Oversee the delivery of complex technical initiatives, ensuring we act consistently on postmortem learnings to improve system resilience. Continuously evaluate development processes, driving efficiency gains that accelerate time-to-market for new telematics-powered features, and work closely with the broader Engineering Manager community to champion engineering excellence across the company. What You Will Need to Succeed Proven Leadership: 6+ years in software engineering with 3+ years in technical leadership or engineering management, specifically leading teams through periods of scale or high complexity. Collaboration & Execution: Demonstrated ability to bridge the gap between technical complexity and business strategy; you can translate product, data, and ML roadmap needs into actionable engineering plans for senior leaders and cross-functional partners. Technical Leadership & Problem Solving: Strong technical judgment in building and scaling distributed data pipelines; you can guide the team through trade-offs in reliability, observability, and latency, ensuring we build sustainable, high-quality systems. Operational Maturity: Strong command of modern cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, Terraform, serverless architecture). People Growth: A track record of developing engineers at varying seniority levels, with a focus on building inclusive, high-ownership cultures built on mutual trust and open communication. Agile & Process Maturity: Experience implementing development practices that balance rapid experimentation with rigorous production stability. You are comfortable championing a 'build-measure-learn' culture, managing technical debt alongside new feature delivery, and facilitating effective ceremonies (e.g., retrospectives, sprint planning) to drive continuous team improvement. AI-Driven Engineering: A proactive approach to driving the adoption and integration of AI tools and technologies within the team’s day-to-day workflows to enhance developer productivity and code quality. Bonus if You Have MLOps & Data Science: Deep experience in productionalizing ML models at scale. Domain Expertise: Prior background in telematics, sensor data pipelines, or insurance/financial services. Observability & Reliability: Advanced experience with logging, monitoring, and tracing tooling (e.g., Datadog) to drive system performance. As part of Root's interview process, we kindly ask that all candidates be on camera for virtual interviews. This helps us create a more personal and engaging experience for both you and our interviewers. Being on camera is a standard requirement for our process and part of how we assess fit and communication style, so we do require it to move forward with any applicant's candidacy. If you have any concerns, feel free to let us know once you are