Manager, Engineering

Smarsh; Pleasanton (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

A tech company in digital communications is seeking an experienced Manager of Engineering to lead their US Server team in Pleasanton, CA. You will manage and mentor Java developers while providing technical leadership in both federal enclave and AWS cloud environments. Ideal candidates should have strong Java expertise, experience in cloud-native architecture, and a passion for Agile methodologies. This position offers an annual salary between $170,000 and $190,000, depending on qualifications and experience.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in Java development.
• 2+ years of experience leading a development team.
• Proven experience in designing and implementing distributed backend systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and manage a team of Java developers.
• Own technical design and architecture decisions.
• Promote engineering best practices.

Skills

Java development

Spring/Spring Boot

Cloud-native architecture

DevOps practices

Agile environment

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Jenkins

Kafka

GitHub

PostgreSQL

Job description

Who are we?

Smarsh empowers its customers to manage risk and unleash intelligence in their digital communications. Our growing community of over 6500 organizations in regulated industries counts on Smarsh every day to help them spot compliance, legal or reputational risks in 80+ communication channels before those risks become regulatory fines or headlines. Relentless innovation has fueled our journey to consistent leadership recognition from analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and our sustained, aggressive growth has landed Smarsh in the annual Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing American companies since 2008.

Summary

We are seeking an experienced and highly capable Manager of Engineering to lead our US Server team. This role involves managing and mentoring a team of Java developers, while also providing strong technical leadership across system architecture, design, and implementation. You will guide the team in developing new product capabilities and enhancing existing ones across both our federal enclave environment and our AWS-based cloud production environment. This position includes dual responsibility across two major domains. Leading, designing, and supporting capabilities within our federal enclave, including strict compliance requirements, secure development practices, and constrained deployment workflows. Driving cloud-native development in AWS, improving our services, reliability, scalability, and efficiency with modern DevOps practices and tooling. The ideal candidate is a strong technical leader, an excellent communicator, and someone who thrives in an Agile environment where mentorship, ownership, and collaboration are key.

Our tech stack includes

Redis, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Spring, Microservices, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Jenkins, Grafana, ELK, Maven, and GitHub.

How will you contribute?

• Lead, mentor, and manage a team of Java developers, including hiring, coaching, performance reviews, and professional development.
• Own technical design and architecture decisions across services deployed in both federal enclave and AWS cloud environments.
• Guide team members in delivering high quality, secure, and scalable backend systems.
• Promote engineering best practices, including code quality, system design, test coverage, DevOps, and security.
• Collaborate closely with Product, DevOps, QA, and Security teams to ensure high quality and compliant releases.
• Oversee production troubleshooting, root cause analysis, system tuning, and operational improvements.
• Drive innovation, evaluate new tools and technologies, and continuously improve engineering processes.
• Lead Agile ceremonies and ensure predictable, high quality delivery.

What will you bring?

• 5+ years of hands‑on experience in Java development, including strong expertise with Spring / Spring Boot.
• 2+ years of experience leading a development team or providing significant technical leadership.
• Strong understanding of OOP, Java internals, concurrency, and multi‑threaded programming.
• Proven experience in designing and implementing distributed backend systems and microservices.
• Hands‑on experience working within secure or federal enclave environments or similar highly restricted environments.
• Practical experience with AWS cloud services and cloud‑native architectures.
• DevOps‑oriented mindset, familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, observability, automation, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Strong communication skills and ability to lead both people and technology. Experience with production environments, monitoring, metrics, and performance optimization.
• Experience supporting FedRAMP‑certified products.
• Knowledge and hands‑on experience with Kafka or other event‑driven messaging systems.
• Familiarity with Redis, Oracle, or PostgreSQL databases.
• Experience with Jenkins, Grafana, ELK, GitHub Actions or similar tools.
• Strong testing mindset (unit, component, integration).
• Experience with large‑scale microservices architectures.

Compensation

$170,000 - $190,000 a year. The above salary range represents Smarsh's good faith and reasonable estimate of the range of possible base compensation at the time of posting. Any applicable bonus programs will be discussed during the recruiting process. The salary for this role will be set based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to, internal equity, experience, education, location, specialty and training. Local cost of living assessments are done for each new hire at the time of offer.

About Our Culture

Smarsh hires lifelong learners with a passion for innovating with purpose, humility and humor. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. We work closely with the most popular communications platforms and the world’s leading cloud infrastructure platforms. We use the latest in AI/ML technology to help our customers break new ground at scale. We are a global organization that values diversity, and we believe that providing opportunities for everyone to be their authentic self is key to our success. Smarsh leadership, culture, and commitment to developing our people have all garnered Comparably.com Best Places to Work Awards. Come join us and find out what the best work of your career looks like.