Senior Software Engineering Manager - Fleet Management

nscaleoperationsukltd; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Nscale, a Seattle-based GPU cloud for AI, is hiring a Software Engineering Manager to lead the Fleet Manager team that provisions, tests, and remediates GPU nodes and network switches at scale. You will own delivery, people leadership, and end-to-end lifecycle of our compute infrastructure.

You’ll stay hands-on with design reviews, incident deep-dives, and coaching, partnering with Principal and Staff engineers. Strong background in Python & distributed systems is essential.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• 2+ years in people management.
• Strong Python & distributed systems background.
• Experience delivering complex, scalable systems.

Responsibilities

• Hire, onboard, and develop software engineers who thrive in a high-autonomy, high-accountability environment.
• Coach performance and career growth, set clear expectations, and handle performance management directly and fairly.
• Own on-call health, handover quality, and a sustainable operational load for the team.
• Turn the Fleet Manager roadmap into executable plans: drive prioritization, manage dependencies and risks, and ship on commitments.
• Run the team's planning, review, and escalation mechanisms, and remove blockers before they become delays.
• Communicate status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to stakeholders - including when the news is bad.
• Uphold engineering standards: code review, testing, CI/CD, incident response, and postmortems that produce durable fixes.
• Own the operational health of the team's services: SLOs, observability, alerting, and incident management.
• Partner with Principal and Staff engineers on architecture and design decisions that balance automation complexity, reliability, and maintainability.
• Stay hands-on where it counts: review designs and code, dig into incidents, and write code where it unblocks the team.
• Collaborate with Product, Infrastructure, Platform, SRE, and UI/UX to capture requirements early, align on interfaces, and ship integrations that meet operator needs.
• Champion AI tools like Claude and Cursor across the team as a fundamental multiplier of what your engineers can build.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

People leadership

Code reviews

Workflow orchestration

Technical architecture

Communication

Tools

MAAS

Ironic

NetBox

DCIMs

OpenStack

CI/CD tools

Job description

About Nscale

Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. Nscale enables AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development. Our GPU cloud bolsters technical capabilities and directly supports strategic business outcomes, including cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility.

We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As an Nscaler, you'll build trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. If you join our team, you'll be contributing to building the technology that powers the future.

About the Role

We're hiring a Software Engineering Manager to lead the team building Fleet Manager - the workflow automation platform that provisions, tests, and remediates GPU nodes and network switches at scale. Reporting to the Director of Software Engineering, Fleet Management based in EMEA, you'll lead the engineers who build the Python-based systems managing the entire operational lifecycle of our compute infrastructure: device enrollment, burn-in testing, network configuration, GPU health monitoring, and automated remediation. You'll own delivery and team health end to end - planning, execution, hiring, and career development - while partnering closely with Principal and Staff engineers who drive technical architecture. We're a hands‑on engineering culture: you'll stay close to the systems through design reviews, incident deep‑dives, and code, with people leadership as your primary craft.

What you'll be doing

Lead and grow the team

• Hire , onboard, and develop software engineers who thrive in a high-autonomy, high-accountability environment.
• Coach performance and career growth, set clear expectations, and handle performance management directly and fairly.
• Own on-call health, handover quality, and a sustainable operational load for the team.

Own delivery and execution

• Turn the Fleet Manager roadmap into executable plans: drive prioritization, manage dependencies and risks, and ship on commitments.
• Run the team's planning, review, and escalation mechanisms, and remove blockers before they become delays.
• Communicate status, risks, and trade‑offs clearly to stakeholders - including when the news is bad.

Drive engineering and operational excellence

• Uphold engineering standards: code review, testing, CI/CD, incident response, and postmortems that produce durable fixes rather than closed tickets.
• Own the operational health of the team's services: SLOs, observability, alerting, and incident management.

Stay technical and partner across Nscale

• Partner with Principal and Staff engineers on architecture and design decisions that balance automation complexity, reliability, and maintainability.
• Stay hands‑on where it counts: review designs and code, dig into incidents, and write code where it unblocks the team.

Collaborate with Product, Infrastructure, Platform, SRE, and UI/UX to capture requirements early, align on interfaces, and ship integrations that meet operator needs.

Champion AI tools like Claude and Cursor across the team as a fundamental multiplier of what your engineers can build.

About You

8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems, including 2+ years directly managing software engineers . Strong technical foundation in Python and distributed systems : credible in design and code reviews, and able to guide trade‑offs in infrastructure automation or workflow tooling. Track record of delivering complex projects from ambiguous requirements to production, with hands‑on day‑2 operations experience (monitoring, incident response, performance optimization).

Proven people leadership: hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing engineers toward senior and staff levels. You are driven by building distributed systems at scale, infrastructure reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement. You use AI tools like Claude or Cursor as a core part of your workflow and know how to raise a whole team's leverage with them. You stay effective while context-switching between technical depth, delivery judgment calls, and people leadership - reviewing a design, unblocking an engineer, and running a hiring debrief in the same morning. Excellent communication skills to build consensus with stakeholders, both internally and externally.

Strong candidates will have

• Experience leading teams that build workflow orchestration systems (Temporal, Airflow, Prefect, or similar)
• Hands‑on experience with infrastructure tooling: DCIMs, NetBox, OpenStack, or ERP systems
• Bare‑metal provisioning and automation: MAAS, Ironic, IPMI, PXE boot, or network automation
• Experience building or managing hardware lifecycle au