Software Engineering Manager

Position Description

Software Engineering Managers are responsible for the continual improvement of themselves, the teams they manage, and the organization as a whole. They lead high-performing engineering teams and drive software quality, architecture, design, development, deployment, operational reliability, and customer service excellence for the organ transplantation community. This role is accountable for delivering secure, scalable, reliable software solutions aligned with organizational strategy, customer needs, and regulatory expectations. The position emphasizes six critical areas necessary for the success of the organization: employees, customers, quality, processes, operational excellence, and cross-functional partnership.

Key Responsibilities

People Leadership & Team Management

• Ensures the team is adequately staffed, resourced, and trained to deliver secure, scalable, reliable software and operational support.
• Responsible for building and sustaining balanced teams through recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and workforce planning that support strong team dynamics and business outcomes.
• Continually evaluate individual and team contributions and actively manage team health through coaching, recognition, development planning, performance management, retention, and appropriate corrective action.
• Hold regular one-on-ones to understand career goals, provide timely feedback, support growth, and maintain development plans for team members.
• Complete and administer performance reviews and support ongoing performance conversations throughout the year.
• Recognize and reinforce organizational core values by celebrating behaviors that strengthen collaboration, accountability, service, and innovation.
• Ability to manage multiple teams and balance near-term delivery needs with long-term technical and organizational health.

Team Communication & Alignment

• Define a clear vision, goals, and measurable outcomes for the team that align with organizational strategy and continually challenge the team to grow.
• Hold regular staff meetings to communicate priorities, organizational context, delivery expectations, and changes that affect the team.
• Maintain team stability and effectiveness while thoughtfully managing organizational changes, dependencies, and evolving business priorities.

Delivery Execution & Operations

• Monitor impediments raised by delivery teams and drive incremental changes to processes, policies, and structures to improve flow and team effectiveness.
• Monitor the flow of work across upstream and downstream partners to improve alignment, reduce bottlenecks, and support efficient delivery.
• Work with the cross-functional partners to ensure successful delivery of projects, programs, and organizational initiatives.
• Coordinate logistics, dependencies, and communication across teams to improve execution and reduce delivery risk.
• Manage post-production support, incident response coordination, and release follow-through for the user community.

Engineering Standards & Quality

• Ensure the code base, platforms, and services support internal and external users with strong maintainability, reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Support and enforce software engineering best practices, secure development standards, and relevant industry standards.
• Ensure the organization continually meets or exceeds ISO 9001 standards and promotes quality, compliance, and accountability as shared goals.

Metrics, Continuous Improvement & Innovation

• Demonstrate and promote agile and continuous improvement practices that enable iterative delivery, transparency, learning, and responsiveness to change.
• Monitor engineering metrics and delivery trends to manage capacity across product enhancements, strategic initiatives, operational work, and internal transformation efforts.
• Use objective measures and metrics to improve quality, predictability, reliability, team health, and continuous improvement across Software Engineering.
• Leverage engineering metrics, retrospectives, and operational insights to continuously improve delivery performance and customer outcomes.
• Evaluate and adopt technologies, including AI-enabled developer tools and cloud-native capabilities, that improve modularity, maintainability, reliability, scalability, and team productivity.

Strategy, Planning & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Contribute to portfolio planning and long-term roadmaps to align upcoming work with team capacity, technical strategy, and business priorities.
• Partner with Service Owners and teams to provide estimates, assess risks, and support planning for committees, leadership, customer innovation, and other strategic work.
• Support strategic goals set by senior management and translate them into actionable engineering plans and execution priorities.
• Work with internal and external customers and cross-functional partners to improve user experience, accessibility, and the overall effectiveness of our software solutions.
• Lead horizontal efforts across software engineering teams to improve consistency, shared capabilities, platform maturity, and engineering effectiveness.
• Manage external partners and contractors to align their delivery, quality, security, and communication practices with internal standards and goals.

Culture & Environment

• Serve as a champion of continuous improvement initiatives to guide engineering standards, architecture alignment, developer experience, and shared tools and methods.
• Foster an environment of creativity, innovation, continuous improvement, and thoughtful experimentation.

Minimum Requirements

• 2+ years of experience managing Software Engineers or other technical professionals required; 5+ years of people management or technical leadership experience preferred.
• 5+ years of software development, software delivery, or related IT experience required, including experience with modern engineering practices, cloud-based environments, and cross-functional product delivery.

Critical Skills

• Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience leading projects and teams in a software development environment, including planning, prioritization, risk management, and delivery coordination.
• Experience leading and managing individuals, including hiring, coaching, mentoring, performance management, and career development.
• Experience managing production environments, including incident response, service reliability, and post-release support processes.
• Demonstrated ability to lead process improvements and implement changes that enhance team efficiency, delivery flow, and engineering effectiveness.
• Demonstrated ability to manage team capacity, prioritize competing demands, and balance strategic initiatives, operational work, and technical debt.

Additional Skills & Qualifications

• Active participation in the technical community and commitment to ongoing learning in modern software engineering practices.
• Passion for emerging technology and the ability to evaluate new tools, including AI-enabled development capabilities, responsibly and pragmatically.
• Experience with Agile development, iterative delivery, and continuous improvement methodologies preferred.

Education

• 4-year degree in computer science or other related field of study, or equivalent professional IT leadership experience

Physical Requirements

• General office demands
• Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
• Frequent reaching, handling, and fine manipulation for using office equipment, filing, and managing paperwork.
• Manual dexterity sufficient to operate a keyboard, mouse, and other office tools.
• Occasional standing, walking, and bending.
• Ability to lift up to 10-20 pounds occasionally.
• Vision abilities required include close vision for computer work and reading documents.
• Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.