Engineering Manager

Squareshift; Chennai District; Hybrid; INR 2,500,000 - 3,500,000; Full time

Job summary

SquareShift in Chennai seeks an Engineering Manager to lead a multi-pod team of senior engineers across cloud, data, and AI/ML practices. This hands-on leadership role emphasizes delivering high-quality outcomes and coach engineers through complex projects.

The ideal candidate should have over 8 years of experience in building production software, with at least 3 years in a managerial capacity. Candidates should have familiarity with Google Cloud Platform, Looker, or Elasticsearch.

This is an exciting opportunity to work closely with senior leadership and contribute to significant projects for Fortune 500 clients.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building production software, with at least 3 years managing engineers.
• Hands-on experience in Google Cloud Platform, Looker/LookML, or modern data engineering.
• Strong written communication and comfortable in ambiguous situations.

Responsibilities

• Lead 15–25 engineers across 2–4 client engagements.
• Run weekly delivery reviews and ensure project execution.
• Drive quality assurance and help engineers with technical decisions.

Skills

Production software management

Google Cloud Platform

Communication skills

Team leadership

Hands-on technical depth

Tools

Kubernetes

Looker

Elasticsearch

Job description

Location: Chennai, India (Hybrid) | Team: Engineering & Delivery | Reports to: Director of Engineering

About SquareShift

SquareShift is a specialized consulting firm focused on cloud modernization, data engineering, AI/ML, and observability. We are a Google Cloud Premier Partner, a Looker Delivery-Verified Partner, and an Elastic Professional Services partner — combining deep platform expertise with senior‑led delivery for ISVs, SaaS companies, and enterprises across the US and India.

We are not a staffing shop. We are a boutique that builds — production data platforms, agentic AI products, and observability systems that go live and stay live. Our engineers work directly with client architects and CTOs.

The Role

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a multi‑pod team of senior engineers across our cloud, data, and AI/ML practices. You will own delivery quality, engineering health, and people growth across two to four concurrent client engagements — typically a mix of GCP data platform builds, Looker/BI migrations, Elasticsearch/observability work, and our internal agentic AI products (Conversational BI, AIResolveX, Agentic QA).

This is a hands‑on leadership role. You will not write production code every day, but you will read PRs, sit in architecture reviews, unblock debugging sessions, and coach senior engineers through hard technical decisions. You are the person clients elevate to when something is on fire, and the person engineers go to when they need air cover.

What You Will Own

Delivery

Lead 15–25 engineers across 2–4 concurrent engagements, balancing client commitments with engineer growth and bench utilization.

Run weekly delivery reviews using our engineering cockpit metrics across Delivery, Quality, and Health pillars (velocity, escape rate, on‑call load, MTTR, engagement scores).

Own SOW‑to‑go‑live execution: scoping inputs, milestone plans, risk registers, change orders, and stakeholder communication with client engineering leadership.

Partner with Pre‑Sales on technical scoping for prospective deals — sizing, staffing models, and risk flags before SOWs go out.

Quality

Set and enforce the engineering bar across pods: code review standards, testing coverage, observability defaults, and production readiness checklists.

Sign off on architecture decisions for net‑new builds and migrations (BigQuery data platforms, Looker/LookML semantic models, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch clusters, Vertex AI agent deployments).

Drive root‑cause analysis for client incidents and internal escapes; ensure learnings flow back into our playbooks and accelerators (T2L, M2L, P2L, C2L).

Direct people management for 8–12 senior engineers and tech leads: 1:1s, KRAs, performance calibration, promotion cases, and growth planning.

Hire and ramp senior engineers — own the technical bar in interviews and the first‑90‑days experience.

Champion engineering culture: internal tech talks, RocketOne.AI bootcamps, Claude Code adoption, and the AI Playbook rollout across the org.

What You Need to Have

8+ years building and operating production software, with at least 3 years managing engineers (mix of IC and management is fine, but you must have managed).

Hands‑on technical depth in at least two of: Google Cloud Platform (BigQuery, Cloud Run, GKE/Kubernetes, Vertex AI), Looker/LookML, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, modern data engineering (Airflow/Dataflow/dbt), or production AI/ML systems.

Working fluency with container and deployment patterns on GCP — Kubernetes (GKE), Cloud Run, and serverless — and the judgement to push back when a team picks the wrong one.

Track record of shipping client engagements end‑to‑end — you have signed off on production go‑lives and owned post‑launch outcomes, not just sprint outputs.

Strong written communication. You can write a clean status update, a defensible architecture rationale, and a hard email to a client when scope is creeping.

Comfortable in ambiguity. Consulting work changes weekly — you should be energized, not destabilised, by replanning.

Bonus Points For

Direct experience with agentic AI patterns: tool‑use, RAG, multi‑agent orchestration, evaluation frameworks, or building on Anthropic / Google ADK / OpenRouter.

Background in BI migrations (Tableau, MicroStrategy, Cognos, or Power BI to Looker).

Observability or SIEM delivery experience on the Elastic Stack.

Prior consulting or services‑firm experience — you understand utilisation, T&M vs fixed‑bid economics, and the texture of client politics.

Why This Role Is Worth Your Time

Real scope. You will lead delivery across multiple Fortune 500 and growth‑stage clients in parallel — not a single product team.

Senior peers. Our engineers are senior by default; you are managing experts, not ramping juniors.

AI is not a side project here. Our internal product portfolio (Conversational BI, AIResolveX, Agentic QA) ships to real users, and you will help shape it.

Direct line to the Director of Engineering and the founders. Decisions move in days, not quarters.