ENGINEERING MANAGER

Keystone Alliance; Southwestern Ontario; On-site; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Aterlo Networks is seeking an Engineering Manager in Waterloo, Ontario. You will coach engineers, set expectations, and remove obstacles to help the team scale while staying hands-on technically.

You’ll lead delivery through testing, deployment, and code quality improvements, balancing speed with reliability as the company grows.

Qualifications

• 2-4 years of experience managing software development teams.
• Experience with SDLC methodologies for SaaS applications designing and building software products at scale.
• A commitment to nurturing a team and growing individuals.
• Strong leadership, communication, and conflict management skills.

Responsibilities

• Coaching the team to be more effective and deliver impact.
• Manage performance conversations and address underperformance.
• Foster belonging and trust, ensuring safe space for feedback.
• Provide clarity on what is being built and why, translating founder context into guidance.
• Hire and onboard new engineers with a structured plan.
• Drive delivery through reliable estimates and structured processes.

Skills

People management

Coaching

Communication

Strategic planning

Agile

Data-driven decisions

Project coordination

KPIs & metrics

Tools

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Our customer, Aterlo Networks is a fast-growing tech company headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada is currently hiring an Engineering Manager.

At Aterlo, the founders lead product and architecture. They set the context: what we're building, why, and the technical vision. As Engineering Manager, you build the capability to deliver it: the right people, practices, and processes to ship reliably as we grow.

You’ll coach and develop engineers, set clear expectations, build trust and accountability, and clear the obstacles that slow the team down. You’ll improve quality through practical changes to testing, deployment, code review, and knowledge sharing. You’ll stay hands-on technically, bring sound judgment to delivery estimates, and add just enough structure to keep the team fast as it scales.

Key Responsibilities

People & Performance

• Coaching: You coach the team on how to be better, have more impact and help them reach their career goals.
• Performance Management: You handle the difficult conversations. If someone isn't performing, you identify it early and either coach them up or manage them out before it hurts the culture.
• Belonging & Trust: You create an environment where engineers feel safe to admit mistakes, speak up when things aren’t clear or push back on unrealistic deadlines.
• Clarity: Ensuring engineers have clarity on what they're building and why (even when that clarity comes from translating founder context, not formal specs or discovery)
• Hiring & Onboarding: You manage the pipeline. You ensure new hires are
• "Missionaries" (passionate about the goal) and have a structured onboarding plan so they don't flounder.

Delivery

• Engineering: Consistently deliver a product that maximizes customer value, product quality, security, and reliability, including building and maintaining highly observable systems with excellent metrics and actionable alerts.
• Team Hygiene: You ensure the teams run standups, retrospectives, and planning sessions as appropriate. You ensure these aren't just empty rituals but actually unblock work.
• Manage Engineering Tools: You ensure the team has the tools to operate successfully and within that manage the tool budget.
• Reality Checks: You protect the team from founder optimism. When founders ask for a feature in 2 days that takes 2 weeks, you are the one who communicates the realistic timeline based on data, not emotion.
• Unblocking: You aggressively remove obstacles whether it’s access to tools, missing designs, or waiting on approval.

Quality & Technical Health

• QA & CI/CD Standards: You implement the testing protocols and deployment pipelines that prevent "it works on my machine" issues.
• Code Quality Standards: Ensure that the codebase has high code quality standards appropriate for each area.
• On-Call & Incident Management: You structure the rotation so that no single engineer (and not the founders) is burned out by 3 AM alerts.
• Manage the 'Bus Factor': You ensure that knowledge is codified and prioritize knowledge transfer from founders and other single points of failure.
• Technical Debt Management: You measure and advocate for paying down technical debt in service of execution speed and quality. You take responsibility for the allocation and effectiveness of the 20% time.
• Architecture: Provide input towards technical direction and architecture decisions

Skills/Qualifications

• 2 - 4 years of experience managing software development teams
• Experience with SDLC methodologies for SaaS applications designing and building software products at scale
• A commitment to nurturing a team and growing individuals
• Strong leadership, consultation communication, and conflict management skills to build consensus with project leaders and stakeholders.
• Entrepreneurial spirit, priding yourself on getting valuable things done with a high level of quality
• Strategic planning and decision analysis capabilities, emphasizing quantitative or data-driven approaches.
• Proven ability to coordinate projects in an agile environment, aligning people, priorities, and dependencies to support successful delivery.
• Sound judgment in selecting tools and KPIs to measure engineering delivery, software quality, and team effectiveness.

Bonus Points

• Experience with networking and Internet Service Providers
• Experience with network or service monitoring products
• Experience operating production services

We are leading this search for Aterlo and look forward to speaking with you. https://keystonealliance.ca

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with optimization, feature engineering, or automated feature selection.
• Exposure to manufacturing, industrial analytics, financial services, or risk/fraud modeling.
• Experience in startup or fast-paced product development environments.
• An advanced degree (e.g. PhD) in computer science, math/statistics or science