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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Manager – Software Engineering

💰 $140,000 - $220,000

EngineeringSoftwareLeadershipTechnology

🎯 Role Definition

The Manager – Software Engineering is a hands-on leader who combines technical depth with people management to deliver high-quality software at scale. This role owns team delivery, engineering execution, and cross-functional partnerships with product, design, QA, and operations. The Manager drives architecture and implementation decisions, mentors engineers, enforces strong engineering practices (CI/CD, code review, testing, observability), and continually improves team health, velocity, and quality. Ideal candidates communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and have a track record of hiring, growing, and retaining high-performing teams.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Software Engineer / Staff Engineer transitioning into first-line management
  • Tech Lead / Engineering Lead with demonstrable ownership of delivery
  • Senior Engineering Manager from a smaller organization or feature team

Advancement To:

  • Director of Engineering
  • Senior Director / Head of Engineering
  • VP of Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • Technical Program Manager
  • Product Management (Senior Product Manager for technical products)
  • Site Reliability / Platform Engineering Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead multiple engineering teams or a single larger team to deliver roadmap commitments on time and with high quality; set clear sprint goals, track metrics (velocity, cycle time, defect rate) and drive continuous delivery improvements.
  • Hire, onboard, coach, and retain engineering talent; conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, career planning, and provide career growth paths and promotion calibration.
  • Define and own the technical roadmap in partnership with product and architecture; translate product strategy into executable engineering plans with milestones, resourcing, and risk mitigations.
  • Architect for scalability and reliability: lead system design reviews, champion microservices or modular architectures, and ensure services meet latency, throughput, and availability targets.
  • Drive technical excellence and engineering standards: enforce code review practices, automated testing (unit/integration/end-to-end), static analysis, and maintainable codebases.
  • Own the quality and observability posture: implement monitoring, logging, alerting, and runbooks to ensure fast detection and resolution of incidents; lead post-incident reviews and corrective action plans.
  • Manage operational cost and cloud usage: optimize cloud architecture (AWS/GCP/Azure), right-size resources, and work with finance to forecast engineering spend.
  • Establish and improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary) to minimize risk and enable frequent, safe releases.
  • Collaborate across product management, UX, QA, and security to prioritize technical debt, scalability improvements, and feature delivery in alignment with business goals.
  • Set engineering OKRs and KPIs; report progress and outcomes to senior leadership and tie engineering efforts to business impact and customer metrics.
  • Lead cross-team initiatives and technical projects: coordinate dependencies, manage risks, and ensure timely integration across platforms and services.
  • Set security, compliance, and data privacy expectations for development teams; partner with security and legal teams to maintain regulatory and standards compliance (e.g., GDPR, SOC2).
  • Mentor and develop engineering leads and senior ICs to scale leadership capacity; run leadership development programs and foster succession planning.
  • Evaluate and adopt new technologies, frameworks, and libraries when they align with company strategy and reduce delivery risk or cost.
  • Balance short-term delivery needs with long-term architecture health by prioritizing refactoring, modularization, and technical debt remediation.
  • Manage stakeholder relationships: negotiate timelines, influence product scope, and provide transparent trade-offs between features, quality, and time-to-market.
  • Build a high-trust engineering culture that values psychological safety, inclusive hiring, diversity, and continuous learning.
  • Lead budgeting, resource planning, and capacity management to ensure teams are appropriately staffed for current and planned work.
  • Facilitate technical hiring processes: craft job descriptions, run interviews, evaluate candidates, and represent the engineering organization in recruiting initiatives.
  • Drive release planning and post-launch analytics: measure feature performance, customer impact, and iterate based on telemetry and user feedback.
  • Lead vendor and third-party software evaluations, contract negotiations, and integrate external services responsibly into the product stack.
  • Ensure reliable, documented APIs and developer experiences for internal and external developers; champion developer productivity and platform self-service.

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.
  • Partner with UX researchers and product analysts to validate technical assumptions and instrument experiments.
  • Support onboarding of new engineering hires with clear learning paths, documentation, and mentorship.
  • Facilitate knowledge sharing across teams through brown-bags, architecture reviews, and design docs.
  • Help define SLAs and SLOs for services and work with operations to ensure observability targets are met.
  • Participate in executive-level planning sessions and provide technical context for strategic business decisions.
  • Advocate for automation of repetitive processes to increase engineering productivity and reduce human error.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • People management and team leadership experience (hiring, performance management, coaching).
  • Strong software architecture and system design skills for distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
  • Deep knowledge of one or more modern programming languages (Java, Kotlin, Python, Go, C#, Node.js) and ability to review code and provide actionable feedback.
  • Cloud-native experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure) including compute, networking, IAM, managed services, and cost management.
  • Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and operational experience running services in production.
  • CI/CD tooling expertise (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI) and automated testing frameworks.
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/Opensearch; ability to define SLOs/SLAs and alerting strategies.
  • Datastore experience: relational databases (Postgres, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB); data modeling and performance tuning knowledge.
  • Security and compliance basics (OWASP, secure coding practices, vulnerability remediation, SOC2/GDPR awareness).
  • Performance optimization, profiling, and capacity planning for high-throughput systems.
  • API design and developer experience: REST, GraphQL, gRPC, API versioning, and contract testing.
  • Familiarity with event streaming and messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub) and patterns for data processing pipelines.
  • Automation and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) for reproducible environments.
  • Agile and lean software development methodologies; experience scaling agile practices across multiple teams.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional verbal and written communication tailored to engineers, product managers, and executives.
  • Strong stakeholder management, influencing without authority, and conflict resolution skills.
  • Strategic thinking and the ability to translate business objectives into technical roadmaps.
  • Empathy, active listening, and people-first leadership to enable team psychological safety and growth.
  • Data-driven decision making: use metrics and telemetry to prioritize and measure success.
  • Time management, prioritization, and the ability to make trade-offs under ambiguity.
  • Coaching and mentoring mindset: develop others and foster a growth-oriented team culture.
  • Resilience and bias for action while maintaining quality and engineering discipline.
  • Cross-functional collaboration and facilitation of effective meetings and ceremonies.
  • Change management skills to lead process and cultural improvements at scale.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree (MS) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, MBA, or equivalent advanced degree or relevant leadership certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Electrical/Computer Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Data Science

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 6–12+ years of software engineering experience with 2–6 years in people management or engineering leadership roles.

Preferred:

  • 8+ years of engineering experience with demonstrated success delivering large-scale systems and 3+ years managing multiple teams or line managers.
  • Experience shipping consumer-facing or enterprise SaaS products, working in fast-paced environments, and driving end-to-end ownership from design to production.
  • Proven track record of hiring and scaling teams, improving team performance, and driving cross-functional initiatives that delivered measurable business outcomes.
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