Manager, Software Engineering

DLB Associates; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical plans

401k match

Paid time off

Job summary

AI2IO seeks a Manager, Software Engineering to lead engineers, strengthen team capability, and create conditions for sustainable software delivery. This role focuses on people, capacity, and organizational support, while collaborating with technical leads, architects, PMs, and product owners.

The Manager will shape staffing plans, performance management, onboarding, and leadership development to ensure teams deliver high-quality software in a scalable way.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading software engineering teams.
• Experience managing performance and development of engineers.
• Ability to plan staffing and succession to sustain delivery.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineers and manage performance, development, staffing, and onboarding.
• Collaborate with tech leads, architects, PMs, and product owners to align delivery.
• Ensure sustainable delivery by balancing capacity, risk, and organizational support.
• Develop future leaders and ensure clear career paths within the teams.
• Escalate and resolve capacity or staffing issues with data-backed options.

Skills

People leadership

Staff development

Cross-team collaboration

Performance management

Structured interviews

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

8+ years of software engineering experience

Tools

Azure DevOps

Microsoft Azure

C#/.NET

SQL Server

Job description

Position Title: Manager, Software Engineering

Position Location: Remote - work virtually from anywhere in the United States

Job Summary

AI2IO is seeking a Manager, Software Engineering to lead engineers, strengthen team capability, and create the organizational conditions required for sustainable software delivery. This is a formal people-management role with accountability for performance, development, staffing, workforce planning, team effectiveness, hiring, onboarding, retention, and the management systems that support a growing engineering organization.

The Manager partners closely with Software Engineer Technical Leads, Architects, Project Managers, Product Owners, and the Director, Software Engineering. Technical Leads retain team-level technical direction, Architects retain cross-team platform authority, and Project Managers retain integrated delivery coordination. The Manager brings sufficient technical depth to understand risk and ask informed questions while focusing primarily on people, capacity, organizational support, management escalation, and the environment in which engineering teams perform.

Essential Functions

This role progresses from complete ownership of people leadership and the delivery environment for assigned teams toward broader organizational effectiveness, management-system adoption, leadership-pipeline development, and readiness for larger engineering-organization scope.

Lead and Develop Engineers

• Serve as the formal manager for assigned engineers through regular one-on-ones, clear role expectations, timely feedback, performance reviews, professional-development planning, and credible support for each direct report.
• Provide recognition and developmental feedback throughout the year rather than relying on formal review cycles.
• Address sustained performance concerns through clear expectations, documented feedback, support plans, follow-through, and appropriate organizational processes.
• Connect individual goals to meaningful assignments, coaching, learning opportunities, mentoring, and increasing ownership without promising advancement before readiness is demonstrated.
• Help employees understand individual-contributor and management career paths, including the different skills, responsibilities, and accountability models each requires.

Build Team Capability and Leadership Depth

• Identify recurring skill gaps and coordinate learning, pairing, role assignments, mentoring, or hiring plans that strengthen team capability.
• Develop potential future Technical Leads and Managers through carefully scoped assignments, clear feedback, and partnership with current leaders.
• Reduce key-person and leadership-continuity risk through documented ownership, distributed capability, and credible succession options.
• Create opportunities for other leaders to operate independently while maintaining appropriate review, support, and accountability.
• Ensure career discussions distinguish sustained next-role readiness from tenure, aspiration, isolated success, or temporary stretch performance. Own the Sustainable Delivery Environment
• Ensure assigned teams have sufficient staffing, capability, role clarity, decision pathways, tools, and organizational support for committed work.
• Partner with Technical Leads and Project Managers to understand delivery health, technical risk, dependencies, capacity limitations, and recovery needs without replacing technical or project-management ownership.
• Ensure material delivery problems receive appropriate management intervention, including staffing changes, priority escalation, cross-team negotiation, or leadership decisions.
• Review recurring delays, incidents, rework, quality concerns, and support burdens to identify organizational, staffing, or capability improvements.
• Protect teams from sustained overload and repeated commitment patterns that are not compatible with available capacity.

Maintain Clear Leadership Boundaries

• Partner with Technical Leads, who own technical feasibility, estimates, dependencies, execution health, engineering standards, and team-level technical direction.
• Partner with Architects, who own cross-team platform architecture and organizational technical standards. Partner with Project Managers, who own the integrated schedule, formal stakeholder communication, scope coordination, project governance, and overall delivery process.
• Partner with Product Owners and Business Analysts while preserving their authority for product direction, priorities, requirements, and analysis practices.
• Escalate unresolved capacity, staffing, conduct, performance, organizational, or cross-team issues through the appropriate leadership path with evidence and recommended options.

Support Candid, Respectful Team Practices

• Establish team practices that support candid discussion of risks, uncertainty, mistakes, technical disagreements, workload concerns, and alternative viewpoints without retaliation or individual blame.
• Respond to observable indicators such as unresolved conflict, sustained workload imbalance, recurring escalation failures, avoidable attrition concerns, or reluctance to raise delivery problems.
• Address interpersonal, performance, conduct, or employee-relations concerns through appropriate management and people-process channels rather than delegating formal people accountability to Technical Leads.
• Create dependable communication rhythms so employees understand priorities, organizational changes, decisions, and available support.
• Maintain appropriate confidentiality while ensuring leaders receive the information required to address material organizational risk.

Plan Workforce, Capacity, and Succession

• Maintain a current view of capacity, critical skills, experience distribution, succession risk, key-person dependencies, and anticipated staffing needs.
• Develop hiring and internal-development plans that address capability gaps rather than treating every vacancy as a direct replacement.
• Identify succession options for critical responsibilities and create development opportunities that reduce knowledge and leadership continuity risk.
• Provide evidence-based staffing, role-design, and capacity recommendations to the Director, Software Engineering.
• Coordinate temporary staffing or responsibility changes transparently when organizational needs require coverage across teams.

Lead Hiring, Selection, and Onboarding

• Partner with the Director on workforce planning and hiring by defining capability needs, role requirements, interview plans, evaluation criteria, and recommended hiring priorities.
• Lead structured and equitable selection processes, calibrate interviewers, document evidence, and make clear candidate recommendations within assigned authority.
• Own consistent onboarding expectations, including role clarity, access, relationships, learning objectives, 30/60/90-day plans, and regular ramp check-ins.
• Evaluate onboarding effectiveness through observable independence, role understanding, delivery contribution, and feedback, then improve the process based on evidence.
• Identify retention risks early and coordinate appropriate responses with the Director and organizational partners. Improve Management Systems and Organizational Effectiveness
• Lead adoption of improved performance-management, career-development, hiring, onboarding, workforce planning, and team-operating practices.
• Define the transition, communication, management enablement, governance, and success measures required for major practice changes.
• Evaluate whether adopted practices improve clarity, fairness, staffing effectiveness, internal growth, leadership continuity, and organizational sustainability.
• Identify patterns spanning multiple engineering teams and coordinate improvements with peer Managers, Technical Leads, Architects, Project Managers, Product Owners, and the Director.
• Improve role clarity, escalation pathways, shared staffing practices, cross-team resource coordination, and management consistency.
• Simplify or retire management practices that add effort without producing useful decisions, employee support, or organizational outcomes.

Contribute to Strategic People Leadership

• Partner with the Director and organizational partners on hiring strategy, compensation planning, career frameworks, workforce design, culture programs, and organizational change.
• Translate organizational priorities into team capability, staffing, development, communication, and operating plans.
• Advise leadership on the people and organizational implications of delivery commitments, technical investments, reorganizations, or capability changes.
• Represent team capacity, capability, succession, and organizational risks in department planning with concise evidence and decision-ready recommendations.
• Maintain responsible stewardship of confidential employee and organizational information.

Grow Toward Broader Organizational Leadership

• Demonstrate effective leadership across multiple teams or a substantial engineering area rather than only one assigned team.
• Develop other Managers and Technical Leads and sustain outcomes through those leaders rather than direct personal involvement in routine team decisions.
• Expand ownership of workforce, succession, organizational design, management systems, and department level capability planning.
• Translate organizational strategy into staffing, operating, investment, capability, and leadership-development plans.
• Demonstrate sustained judgment in balancing employee needs, delivery outcomes, technical capability, organizational risk, and business priorities.

Performs Other Related Duties as Assigned

What Success Looks Like

• Direct reports understand their role expectations, receive timely feedback, and have credible development plans.
• Performance concerns, recognition, and growth opportunities are addressed promptly rather than deferred to formal review cycles.
• Technical Leads retain clear technical authority and receive effective management partnership.
• Teams have sufficient staffing, capability, role clarity, and organizational support to deliver sustainably.
• Delivery, workload, retention, capability, and succession risks are visible early and addressed with clear ownership.
• Hiring decisions reflect documented capability needs and structured evaluation, and new employees receive consistent onboarding support.
• Management practices are applied consistently across comparable roles and teams.
• The engineering organization sustains delivery during leadership absences because ownership, decision paths, and critical knowledge are distributed.

Position Requirements

• Demonstrated experience managing performance, providing difficult feedback, recognizing strong contribution, developing talent, and applying fair career expectations.
• Experience conducting performance reviews, promotion assessments, career calibration, and documented performance-improvement processes.
• Demonstrated ability to build healthy, capable software teams while preserving clear authority for Technical Leads, Architects, Product Owners, and Project Managers.
• Experience with workforce planning, capacity planning, skill-gap assessment, succession planning, and evidence-based staffing recommendations.
• Experience defining roles, conducting structured interviews, selecting candidates, and improving onboarding and retention practices.
• Sufficient technical depth to engage credibly with engineers and technical leaders, evaluate delivery and operational risk, and understand tradeoffs without directing implementation.
• Experience partnering on delivery and operational risk, cross-team dependencies, organizational blockers, and sustainable workload management.
• Demonstrated success leading organizational change and adopting improved management or team operating practices.
• Experience managing distributed or remote software teams and communicating effectively across technical, product, delivery, and organizational audiences.
• Ability to handle confidential employee information responsibly and partner effectively with HR or people operations functions.
• Excellent interpersonal, written, verbal, coaching, facilitation, conflict-resolution, and organizational judgment.
• Prior experience as a Software Engineer Technical Lead, senior software engineer, or comparable technical leader. Experience developing other managers or leading across multiple engineering teams.
• Experience with Azure DevOps, Microsoft Azure, C#/.NET, ASP.NET Blazor, SQL Server, Microsoft Graph API, or adjacent enterprise software platforms.
• Formal or informal project-management experience that strengthens sequencing, dependency management, risk visibility, and cross-team coordination without replacing the dedicated Project Manager role.
• Experience contributing to compensation planning, career-framework design, organizational design, or department-level workforce strategy.
• Relevant management, coaching, Agile, project-management, or technical certifications.
• Build capable software teams and management systems within a growing Microsoft-centric engineering organization.
• Partner with clearly defined technical, architecture, product, analysis, quality, and project-delivery leadership roles.
• Shape workforce capability, career development, succession, hiring, onboarding, and sustainable delivery practices.
• Develop engineers and emerging leaders through meaningful assignments, clear expectations, coaching, and evidence-based feedback.
• Contribute to the organizational foundation supporting business applications, engineering tools, automation, and AI-enabled products.

Travel / Relocation Requirements

• Up to 5%, this may include travel to any or all 50 US states
• Travel is defined as physically leaving home on behalf of business activities including but not limited to client sites, meetings with other employees, meeting for business development purposes, running errands on behalf of the business, attending industry conferences, etc.

Education / Experience Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering or closely related technical-delivery experience, including at least 2 years of formal people management within a software organization.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Information Systems, Business, Organizational Leadership, or equivalent experience preferred.

Benefits

AI2IO offers a very competitive benefits package; highlights include

• Choice of comprehensive medical plans (including two PPO-style plans and a HDHP w/ HSA option)
• Flex spending accounts (FSA)
• Dental and vision plans
• Comprehensive medical, dental and vision benefits extended to spouse / domestic partner and dependent children up to age 26
• 401k with company match and self-directed brokerage account option
• PTO including additional paid time off during the last week of the year
• Company paid life insurance coverage for employees and their eligible dependents
• Short and long-term disability, AD&D coverage
• Professional development opportunities, tuition reimbursement and professional licensing assistance
• Paid parental leave after one year of employment

CO, CA, IL, NY, WA, and Washington DC residents only: In accordance with CO, CA, IL, NY, WA, and Washington DC law, the range provided is AI2IO’s reasonable estimate of the base compensation for this role. The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and location.

AI2IO is an EEO/Affirmative Action Employer and participates in the E-Verify program with the Department of Homeland Security. We encourage diversity in our workforce.

NOTICE TO THIRD PARTY AGENCIES:

AI2IO does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters, employment agencies, or other staffing services. Unsolicited resumes include any resume or hiring document sent to AI2IO in the absence of a signed Service Agreement where AI2IO has expressly requested recruitment/staffing services specific to the position at hand. Any unsolicited resumes,