Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Development Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Development Manager is a hands-on engineering leader responsible for planning, delivering, and continuously improving software products and platforms. This role blends technical ownership (architecture and code quality), people leadership (hiring, coaching, career development), and program management (roadmap delivery, cross-functional coordination). The ideal candidate drives predictable delivery, balances short-term tactical needs with long-term strategic technical decisions, and acts as the primary liaison between product, design, QA, operations, and senior leadership.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Software Engineer or Staff Engineer with demonstrated leadership and project ownership.
Technical Lead or Team Lead responsible for mentoring and technical direction.
Engineering Manager (individual contributor to first-line management transition).

Advancement To:

Senior Development Manager or Group Engineering Manager with multi-team responsibility.
Director of Engineering accountable for multiple product lines or platforms.
VP of Engineering or Head of Product Development for larger organizations.

Lateral Moves:

Product Manager / Senior Product Owner (technical product leadership)
Program Manager / Technical Program Manager (cross-functional delivery focus)
Solutions Architect or Principal Engineer (return to deep technical specialization)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team by setting clear objectives, conducting regular 1:1s, driving career development plans, and executing performance reviews to retain top talent.
Own delivery of the engineering roadmap end-to-end, translating product strategy into sprint goals, milestones, and release schedules while minimizing scope creep and ensuring on-time launches.
Partner closely with Product Management and Design to define product requirements, prioritize the backlog, and balance business value with technical risk and effort estimates.
Define and enforce software development lifecycle (SDLC) best practices, including code review standards, branching strategies, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and release management to ensure consistent quality and reliability.
Architect and evolve scalable, secure, and maintainable systems by making informed technology choices (microservices, APIs, cloud-native patterns) and driving technical debt reduction initiatives.
Manage the full hiring lifecycle for engineering roles—sourcing, interviewing, selection, and offer negotiation—while building an inclusive hiring process and diverse candidate pipeline.
Establish engineering KPIs and metrics (throughput, cycle time, MTTR, code coverage, production incidents) and deliver regular performance reports to senior leadership for data-driven decision-making.
Oversee operational excellence, including incident response, on-call rotations, post-mortems with actionable remediation plans, and capacity planning to reduce downtime and customer impact.
Create and manage engineering budgets, forecast resource needs, and allocate team capacity effectively to align with product roadmaps and organizational priorities.
Drive cross-functional collaboration with QA, DevOps, security, and customer success teams to incorporate testing, observability, monitoring, and compliance into the delivery pipeline.
Lead architectural reviews and design discussions, ensuring that proposed solutions meet scalability, performance, security, and maintainability standards.
Implement and champion DevOps practices—CI/CD automation, infrastructure-as-code, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and cloud deployments—to accelerate delivery and improve reliability.
Negotiate and manage relationships with vendors, contractors, and external partners and oversee statement-of-work (SOW) execution, contract terms, and third-party integrations.
Conduct risk assessments and proactively identify project dependencies and constraints, creating mitigation plans to address schedule, scope, or technical risks.
Facilitate Agile ceremonies (sprint planning, daily standups, retrospectives) and continuously improve team processes to increase predictability, quality, and throughput.
Mentor engineers on software craftsmanship, design patterns, test-driven development (TDD), and performance optimization to raise team technical capability.
Drive product observability and telemetry strategy by selecting and configuring monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting tools to enable proactive issue detection and performance analytics.
Lead initiatives to manage and reduce technical debt by prioritizing refactors, upgrades, and architectural investments in roadmap planning.
Ensure compliance with security requirements, regulatory standards (e.g., GDPR, SOC 2), and internal policies through collaboration with security and legal teams and by integrating security checks into CI pipelines.
Represent engineering in stakeholder meetings, product demos, executive updates, and cross-functional planning sessions, articulating trade-offs, timelines, and status with clarity and influence.
Own release readiness and feature rollout strategies, including feature toggles, canary releases, phased rollouts, and rollback plans to minimize customer impact.
Establish a culture of continuous learning by organizing brown-bags, technical workshops, and internal knowledge-sharing sessions to spread best practices and new technology adoption.
Drive performance tuning and capacity planning for mission-critical services, ensuring latency, throughput, and resource utilization meet SLAs.
Lead compliance and audit readiness activities for platforms, ensuring that security controls, access management, and change tracking meet audit requirements.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proven experience designing and delivering cloud-native architectures on AWS, GCP, or Azure, including serverless and container-based deployments.
Strong understanding of back-end technologies and frameworks (e.g., Java, Kotlin, C#, Python, Node.js) and front-end stacks when needed (React, Angular, Vue).
Experience with microservices architecture, RESTful APIs, and event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
Expertise in CI/CD tools and pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
Familiarity with container orchestration and runtime platforms (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS/GKE/AKS).
Solid knowledge of data stores: relational databases (Postgres, MySQL), NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra), and caching layers (Redis).
Hands-on understanding of observability tooling—metrics, logs, tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, Jaeger).
Experience implementing automated testing strategies (unit, integration, end-to-end) and test frameworks.
Practical experience with security best practices, access controls, secrets management, and vulnerability scanning.
Proficiency with source control workflows and review processes (Git, GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket) and branching strategies.
Familiarity with Agile software development frameworks (Scrum, Kanban) and experience driving Agile adoption at team scale.
Budgeting and resource planning skills, including capacity planning and vendor contract management.
Ability to interpret product analytics and make roadmap trade-offs using data; familiarity with analytics tools (Looker, Tableau, Mixpanel) is a plus.

Soft Skills

Strong leadership and people-management skills with demonstrated ability to hire, motivate, and retain engineers.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills for cross-functional stakeholder engagement and executive reporting.
Strategic thinking and prioritization capabilities to balance short-term delivery with long-term technical health.
Coaching and mentoring mindset with a focus on developing engineers’ careers and building technical depth across the team.
Effective decision-making under uncertainty and the ability to escalate appropriately with sensible trade-offs.
Collaboration and influence across remote and distributed teams, fostering psychological safety and open feedback cultures.
Conflict resolution and negotiation skills to align differing priorities between product, engineering, and business stakeholders.
High degree of accountability and ownership with bias for action and continuous improvement.
Customer-centric mindset; ability to translate customer needs and feedback into technical requirements.
Time management and organizational skills to oversee multiple concurrent projects and deadlines.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering Management, or MBA preferred for senior or cross-functional leadership roles.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Computer Engineering
Information Technology / Systems
Business Administration / Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

5–12+ years in software development roles with progressive responsibility, including 2–5 years in people leadership or engineering manager roles.

Preferred:

8+ years total experience with at least 3+ years managing engineering teams delivering SaaS or consumer-facing products, proven track record of shipping complex systems, and experience managing distributed teams across time zones.