Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Manager Development

🎯 Role Definition

The IT Manager Development leads cross-functional software engineering teams to design, build, and operate high-quality applications and services. This role combines technical leadership, people management, delivery ownership and strategic planning to ensure the organization’s software products meet performance, security, scalability and business goals. The IT Manager Development is accountable for the full software development lifecycle (SDLC), CI/CD pipelines, architecture decisions, vendor relationships and continuous improvement across development practices.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead with strong delivery and people leadership experience
Engineering Manager or Team Lead responsible for multiple agile teams
Solutions Architect or Principal Engineer transitioning to people management

Advancement To:

Director of Engineering
Head of Software Development
VP of Engineering / Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Lateral Moves:

Product Management (Director / Senior PM)
DevOps / Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead
Enterprise Architecture or Solution Architecture leadership

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead, mentor and grow multiple software development teams, setting clear objectives, conducting performance reviews, and creating career development plans to build a high-performing engineering organization aligned with product and business priorities.
Own end-to-end delivery of complex software initiatives, managing scope, timelines, dependencies and risk while ensuring alignment with company objectives and stakeholder expectations.
Define and enforce engineering standards, best practices, coding conventions, and development workflows to improve code quality, reduce technical debt and accelerate delivery across teams.
Architect and validate scalable, maintainable solutions by partnering with architects and senior engineers to design microservices, APIs, data models and integration patterns that support future growth.
Drive adoption and continual improvement of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, build and release processes using industry-standard tools to achieve frequent, reliable deployments.
Lead cloud strategy and implementation decisions (AWS, Azure, GCP), including cost optimization, security configurations, governance and migration of legacy systems to modern cloud-native architectures.
Manage cross-functional program planning, including resource allocation, sprint planning, and backlog prioritization with product management to ensure predictable delivery of business value.
Implement and monitor application performance and observability (APM, logging, metrics), establish SLAs/SLIs, and lead performance tuning and incident response to maintain system availability and reliability.
Own technical vendor selection and management (SaaS, third-party platforms, contractors), negotiate contracts, track vendor performance and ensure compliance with security and procurement policies.
Collaborate with security and compliance teams to enforce secure coding practices, perform threat modeling, remediate vulnerabilities and meet regulatory requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC2 as applicable).
Drive roadmap planning for development platforms, developer experience improvements and tooling investments that reduce cycle time and increase developer productivity.
Establish and report on engineering KPIs (velocity, cycle time, defect rates, uptime) to senior leadership, using data to make informed trade-offs and resource decisions.
Lead technical due diligence and integration planning for M&A or strategic partnerships, ensuring compatibility of development standards, systems and processes.
Champion agile transformation and modern delivery methods (Scrum, Kanban), coaching teams on ceremonies, continuous improvement and value-driven incremental delivery.
Coordinate cross-team technical alignment and architectural guardrails to prevent duplication, enable reuse and ensure effective API and service contracts across product lines.
Facilitate effective stakeholder communication across product, operations, QA, security and business units to translate business requirements into technical deliverables and acceptance criteria.
Oversee budgeting for development initiatives, headcount planning, tooling, cloud spend and infrastructure, and provide quarterly forecasts and cost-control measures.
Lead root cause analysis and post-mortems for major incidents; implement remediation plans and track follow-through to prevent recurrence and improve organizational resilience.
Recruit, interview and onboard top engineering talent, designing inclusive hiring processes and improving time-to-productivity for new hires.
Balance short-term delivery needs with long-term technical strategy by prioritizing refactors, platform investments and technology upgrades to mitigate technical debt.
Drive documentation standards for architecture, APIs, runbooks and onboarding materials to reduce knowledge silos and accelerate new team members.
Serve as an escalation point for complex technical issues, coordinating subject matter experts and vendors to resolve blockers that impact delivery timelines.

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.
Act as a cross-functional liaison to coordinate release windows, feature toggles, and deployment rollbacks when needed.
Mentor mid-level and junior managers on people leadership, conflict resolution and performance coaching.
Promote a culture of security-first development by embedding security checks into the CI/CD pipeline and developer workflows.
Evaluate and pilot new development tools, frameworks and libraries to maintain a modern, efficient tech stack.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proven experience leading software development teams and delivering enterprise-grade applications end-to-end.
Deep knowledge of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and modern delivery practices including Agile, Scrum and Kanban.
Hands-on understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization/orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines and build/release automation tools (Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions).
Familiarity with microservices architecture, RESTful API design, event-driven systems and distributed system patterns.
Strong background in programming and code review practices; fluency in one or more languages such as Java, C#, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go.
Experience with relational and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, Redis) and data modeling.
Knowledge of observability tooling and APM solutions (New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack) for monitoring and incident management.
Security and compliance knowledge: threat modeling, secure coding, vulnerability scanning, IAM, encryption and regulatory frameworks (SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA).
Vendor and contract management experience including SaaS integrations, third-party risk assessments and vendor performance metrics.
Practical experience with automated testing strategies (unit, integration, E2E), test frameworks and test automation tools.
Budgeting and financial acumen for cloud cost management, forecasting and capital/operational expenditure trade-offs.
Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and configuration management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet).

Soft Skills

Strong leadership and people management skills with a track record of building motivated, diverse engineering teams.
Excellent stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration to balance technical constraints with business needs.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; able to translate technical concepts for non-technical leaders.
Strategic thinker with the ability to create and execute a multi-quarter technical roadmap.
Problem-solving mindset and ability to make data-driven decisions under ambiguity and pressure.
Coaching and mentoring orientation to grow engineers and managers across the organization.
Conflict resolution skills and the ability to navigate organizational change.
Strong prioritization and time-management skills; ability to manage multiple high-impact initiatives simultaneously.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field (or equivalent professional experience).

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering Management, MBA, or related advanced degree.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Information Systems
Information Technology Management
Business Administration (for technical leadership)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

7 to 15+ years in software development, with at least 3 to 7 years in engineering management or technical leadership roles.

Preferred:

8+ years of progressive software engineering experience and 5+ years managing multiple teams or managers in an enterprise environment, proven success delivering cloud-native platforms and scalable services.