Sr. Manager, Software Engineering

Innovation Associates, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Innovation Associates, Inc. seeks a Sr. Manager, Software Engineering to lead a small team modernizing the NEXiA platform, a customer-deployed pharmacy automation system.

The role fuses hands-on coding with leadership: you will personally write and review code each week and set technical direction through concrete examples. Expect to normalize release discipline and drive predictable delivery in a code-driven environment.

Qualifications

• Must have hands-on software engineering experience while leading a team
• Strong ability to mentor and coach engineers
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

Responsibilities

• Hire, mentor, and lead a small software engineering team while remaining in the code yourself
• Set technical direction through working examples - the patterns you establish in code review and your own commits are the ones the team follows
• Create clear ownership and accountability: who owns which modules, who makes which decisions, what “done” means
• Address performance issues directly and early; a small team can’t carry passengers
• Represent engineering reality to leadership - honest capacity, honest timelines, honest risk
• Own sprint-to-sprint execution: planning, sequencing, and unblocking so the team ships predictably
• Establish and enforce engineering practices - pull-request review discipline, meaningful test coverage, incremental delivery over big-bang merges
• Drive releases that are routine, not events: staged rollouts, rollback paths, and validation against the customer configurations that actually exist
• Prioritize ruthlessly: modernization scope always exceeds capacity, so sequencing is a core management skill

Job description

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Sr. Manager, Software Engineering

Full Time Management US

16 days ago Requisition ID: 2062

The Role:

Lead a small software engineering team modernizing the NEXiA platform - a customer-deployed pharmacy automation system that has evolved through several technology generations. The work is incremental decomposition of a .NET/VB6-era codebase into well-bounded modules, shipped to on-prem customer environments where upgrade safety and backward compatibility are non-negotiable.

The day-one reality: the team is capable but the delivery machinery around it is uneven. Standards vary across repos, test coverage is inconsistent, and release discipline depends more on individual habits than on shared process. The mission is to turn this into a team that ships predictably - clear ownership, reviewed code, tested changes, boring releases.

This is a player-coach role. You will lead the team and you will personally write and review code every week. Candidates whose hands-on work ended when they became managers are not a fit for this role.

The engineering environment here is code-driven end to end: environments are provisioned through Terraform and Ansible, builds and deploys run through GitHub Actions, and the product ships to customers as a versioned VM. You won’t own that substrate - a peer infrastructure team does - but you can’t lead effectively here while treating it as a black box. You need to understand what infrastructure as code is and the role it plays in this ecosystem: why environments are code-driven, what the pipeline does between commit and customer, and how to hold your team accountable for the operability of what they ship. Being able to read the Terraform yourself is a bonus, not the bar.

Finally: this team is pushing boundaries, particularly in agentic tooling, where the state of the art changes monthly. That requires someone who leans in - who learns by trying, breaks things in the process, and treats those mistakes as tuition rather than something to apologize for. Curiosity here is not a personality bonus; it’s how the work gets done.

What you’ll do:

• Hire, mentor, and lead a small software engineering team while remaining in the code yourself
• Set technical direction through working examples - the patterns you establish in code review and your own commits are the ones the team follows
• Create clear ownership and accountability: who owns which modules, who makes which decisions, what “done” means
• Address performance issues directly and early; a small team can’t carry passengers
• Represent engineering reality to leadership - honest capacity, honest timelines, honest risk

Delivery Management

• Own sprint-to-sprint execution: planning, sequencing, and unblocking so the team ships predictably
• Establish and enforce engineering practices - pull-request review discipline, meaningful test coverage, incremental delivery over big-bang merges
• Drive releases that are routine, not events: staged rollouts, rollback paths, and validation against the customer configurations that actually exist
• Prioritize ruthlessly: modernization scope always exceeds capacity, so sequencing (what gets decomposed first, what stays legacy for now) is a core management skill here

Technical Direction

• Guide the incremental decomposition of legacy NEXiA capabilities into bounded, testable modules without disrupting active customers
• Make and defend architectural trade-offs between isolation and pragmatism - not every boundary needs a rewrite
• Design for customer-deployed constraints: long-lived versions, upgrade paths, backward compatibility, customer-specific configurations
• Partner with Product and Quality so modernization work