Junior Engineering Manager

Assistant or Junior Engineering Manager

Greater Cleveland, OH | Hybrid: 2-3 days onsite

You are a strong senior engineer who moved into management in the last few years, and you have no interest in drifting away from the technology. This role is built for exactly that point in a career.

You would come in alongside an established Engineering Manager, not in place of one. You get a peer and a manager above you who already know the business, the products and the teams, and you get real scope from day one: three to four team leads, each running three to four developers, so sixteen to twenty engineers under you through your leads.

We have been building software for one industry since 1985 and we lead it. Private-equity backing is funding a serious investment in engineering, and we are integrating several companies we have acquired, so there is a lot of new product work in front of us. We have made the Inc. 5000 more than once and are a repeat regional top-workplace award winner.

The culture holds up outside our own marketing: 4.0 out of 5 on Glassdoor, 78 percent of employees recommending us to a friend, and work-life balance rated 4.2. That last number is not an accident. Our offshore vendor agreements say plainly that they work on our time, not the other way around, and their liaisons are contractually available until noon Eastern. Nobody here runs a team from their kitchen at 3 a.m.

The campus is built for people who are actually in it: onsite gym with free personal training and fitness classes, in-office massages and manicures, house cleaning and laundry service, monthly car washes, catered lunches on Wednesdays, monthly happy hours, a game room, and local sports tickets. Benefits include full medical, dental and vision, a 401(k) with match, and tuition reimbursement.

The work

This is new feature development on a modern stack. Roughly 70 percent of our estate runs in Azure, our core cloud, with the remaining 30 percent split between AWS and GCP from companies we acquired. You will not spend your days keeping a legacy desktop product on life support. You will be shipping new capability against multi-cloud infrastructure that is already in place.

What you'll do

·      Lead three to four team leads and, through them, sixteen to twenty engineers

·      Provide hands-on technical leadership on new development across Azure, AWS and GCP

·      Guide how solutions get built through architecture input, design reviews and code reviews. You are not expected to write all the code; you are expected to know the technology well enough to steer it

·      Mentor and develop team leads and engineers, and grow the bench underneath you

·      Work with vendor project managers and team leads on fixed-bid offshore projects, rather than managing offshore developers directly

·      Partner with Product, QA, Architecture, Security and DevOps to deliver integrated solutions

·      Raise the engineering standard through SOLID principles, clean code, modern architecture patterns and observability

·      Help shape the processes we are still building, rather than importing someone else’s playbook wholesale

·      Support planning and execution across multiple product initiatives running in parallel

What you bring

·      7+ years in software engineering, with the majority of it hands-on

·      Roughly two to four years leading engineers, likely as a team lead and then as a manager. This is a role for your second management job, not your fifth

·      Real depth in modern application development and cloud-native architecture

·      Enterprise experience, without needing a heavy process framework around you. We are still developing ours and want someone flexible enough to help build it

·      A mentor’s instinct. The people who do well here enjoy developing engineers more than they enjoy running a process

·      Strong communication and collaboration skills

What you'll work with

·      Backend: .NET, C#, REST APIs

·      Frontend: TypeScript, React, Vue

·      Cloud: Azure (core, ~70 percent), AWS and GCP (~30 percent, from acquisitions)

·      Data: SQL Server (required), PostgreSQL (a plus)

·      Architecture: API-first, event-driven systems

·      Delivery: Agile

One more thing worth knowing

We published an AI roadmap this year that runs through 2027. Phase one, prompt-driven development for engineering execution, is already live and operational in eight of our twelve teams. Later phases move into AI-assisted engineering operations and spec-driven development. This team executes against that roadmap. AI experience is welcome but not required. We would rather hire a strong engineer and leader and bring them into the work.

If you want to keep your hands on the technology while you build a team, and you are within commuting distance of the west side of Cleveland, apply now.