Senior Manager Software Engineering

Acuity; Cork; Hybrid; EUR 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Acuity Inc. in Cork is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to join the Digital Center of Excellence and lead a team building and operating the Azure and Databricks foundation used by data engineering, analytics, and AI teams.

You will lead people, set technical direction, and own delivery across development, test, and production environments, ensuring security, reliability, and cost-conscious operations at scale.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering or cloud/platform engineering.
• Demonstrated people management experience with hiring and coaching.
• Experience delivering complex, multi-stakeholder projects with strong delivery discipline.
• Hands-on background with Databricks, Azure Data Lake, cloud platforms, and DevOps.
• Strong knowledge of Git, CI/CD, observability, reliability, security, and cost management.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers, set direction, and develop talent.
• Define and drive engineering patterns for Databricks and Azure Data Lake platform capabilities.
• Own delivery planning, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment with clear commitments.
• Ensure secure identity, automation, and platform governance in collaboration with security teams.
• Oversee reliability, incident response, cost optimization, and platform upgrades.

Skills

Databricks

Azure Data Lake

Cloud platforms

DevOps

Git

CI/CD

Observability

Reliability

Security

Cost management

Leadership

Talent development

People management

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS

Tools

Azure DevOps

Job description

Acuity Inc. (NYSE: AYI) is a market-leading industrial technology company. We use technology to solve problems in spaces, light and more things to come. Through our two business segments, Acuity Brands Lighting (ABL) and Acuity Intelligent Spaces (AIS), we design, manufacture, and bring to market products and services that make a valuable difference in people’s lives.

We achieve growth through the development of innovative new products and services, including lighting, lighting controls, building management solutions, and an audio, video and control platform. We focus on customer outcomes and drive growth and productivity to increase market share and deliver superior returns. We look to aggressively deploy capital to grow the business and to enter attractive new verticals.

Acuity Inc. is based in Atlanta, Georgia, with operations across North America, Europe and Asia. The Company is powered by approximately 13,000 dedicated and talented associates. Visit us at www.acuityinc.com .

Job Summary

Acuity is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to join the Digital Center of Excellence (DCoE) in Cork and lead an engineering team responsible for building and operating the Azure and Databricks foundation used by data engineering, analytics, and AI teams.

The role combines people leadership, technical direction, delivery accountability, and operational ownership. The successful candidate will build a high-performing team, develop engineering talent, establish clear delivery practices, and ensure the platform is secure, reliable, observable, scalable, and cost-conscious across development, test, and production environments

Key Tasks & Responsibilities (Essential Functions)

People Leadership & Team Development
Lead, coach, and develop a team of engineers, creating clear expectations for performance, ownership, collaboration, and technical quality.
Conduct regular one-to-ones, provide timely feedback, support career development, and create individual growth plans aligned to business and engineering needs.
Build an inclusive, accountable team culture where people raise risks early, learn from incidents, share knowledge, and continuously improve.
Own workforce planning, hiring, onboarding, role clarity, succession planning, and capability development for the team.
Recognize strong performance, address performance concerns constructively, and support engineers in achieving their full potential.

Engineering Leadership & Technical Direction
Set the engineering direction for Databricks and Azure Data Lake platform capabilities in partnership with architecture, security, data engineering, analytics, and AI teams.
Ensure the team establishes and follows supported engineering patterns for workspace configuration, compute, Unity Catalog, storage integration, environment management, and lakehouse workloads.
Maintain a strong technical understanding of the platform, challenge design decisions where appropriate, and help the team resolve complex engineering and operational issues.
Drive sound engineering practices across architecture, code quality, testing, documentation, security, maintainability, and technical debt management.
Balance near-term delivery commitments with longer-term platform sustainability, standardization, and simplification.

Delivery & Stakeholder Management
Own delivery outcomes for the team, including planning, prioritization, execution, dependency management, risk management, and transparent status reporting.
Partner with product, program, architecture, and business stakeholders to translate priorities into clear engineering plans and achievable commitments.
Create clarity on scope, sequencing, ownership, and decision-making, and ensure blockers and delivery risks are escalated early.
Use engineering and delivery metrics to improve predictability, flow, quality, reliability, and team effectiveness.
Communicate technical trade-offs, delivery options, risks, and recommendations clearly to both technical and business audiences.

Security, DevOps & Automation
Ensure secure identity, secrets, networking, role-based access, and platform governance patterns are implemented with security and architecture teams.
Drive infrastructure-as-code, repeatable environment configuration, and automation of platform provisioning and change management.
Ensure effective Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows, quality gates, release controls, and secure software supply chain practices are in place.
Promote controlled, traceable, and low-risk changes across development, test, and production environments.

Reliability & Operations
Own the operational readiness and supportability of the platform, including monitoring, logging, alerting, runbooks, capacity, recovery, and incident response.
Ensure observability covers jobs, pipelines, data freshness, runtime performance, platform health, usage, and cost.
Lead structured incident and problem management, ensuring root causes are understood and corrective actions are completed.
Drive performance tuning, cost optimization, upgrade planning, resilience, disaster recovery, and continuous operational improvement.
Establish clear service ownership and support expectations across engineering and stakeholder teams.

Skills and Minimum Experience Required

10+ years of experience in software engineering, cloud platform engineering, data platform engineering, DevOps, or related roles, including experience leading and developing engineers.

Demonstrated people management experience, including coaching, performance management, career development, hiring, and building high-performing teams.

Strong experience leading delivery across complex technical initiatives with multiple stakeholders, dependencies, and operational considerations.

Hands-on technical background with Databricks, Azure Data Lake, cloud platforms, data engineering, DevOps, or comparable enterprise technology environments.

Strong knowledge of engineering practices including Git, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, testing, observability, reliability, security, and cost management.

Ability to make pragmatic decisions, manage competing priorities, and communicate technical and delivery trade-offs clearly.

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Skills and Experience

Preferred Qualifications

Experience managing platform, data, cloud, DevOps, or site reliability engineering teams in an enterprise environment.
Databricks, Microsoft Azure, engineering leadership, or DevOps certification.
Experience supporting supply chain, manufacturing, ERP, or operational analytics platforms.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code, private networking, enterprise identity, policy automation, disaster recovery, and cost governance.
Experience leading teams through growth, organizational change, platform modernization, or operating-model improvement.

Tools & Technologies

Platform: Databricks, Azure Data Lake, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog
Automation: infrastructure-as-code, reusable templates, Azure DevOps CI/CD
Security: managed identities, service principals, secrets, networking, RBAC
Operations: monitoring, logging, alerting, recovery, capacity, performance and cost management
Leadership: delivery planning, engineering metrics, talent development, performance management, and stakeholder communication.

We value diversity and are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regards to race, color, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, ethnicity or national origin, disability, pregnancy, religion, covered veteran status, protected genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Accommodation in the Application Process: Acuity Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. It complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other applicable laws requiring reasonable accommodation of persons with disabilities in employment. This includes the provision of reasonable accommodation in the application process. If you believe you need reasonable accommodation to assist with our online application system or any aspect of the application process, please contact Human Resources at [phone], and select option 4. Please be prepared to identify the requisition / position applied for and the aspect of the application process for which you believe accommodation is needed. The company will engage in an interactive process with you to better understand the request and to determine whether reasonable accommodation is needed and available.