Senior Engineering Manager for DC Buying at Afresh

About the Role

As Senior Engineering Manager for DC Buying, you’ll lead engineering for Afresh’s AI-powered fresh buying product. Buyers at grocery distribution centers use it to decide what to buy, how much, and when. Every order a DC buyer places determines what lands in the stores it serves. Get it right and shelves stay full and less food goes to waste across the whole network.

DC Buying is live with enterprise customers and scaling fast. Your job is to make it the tool DC buyers can’t work without. You’ll own engineering end to end and partner with product, design, data engineering, and applied science on one roadmap. You’ll also work directly with customers to ensure what we build supports buyers’ daily work.

We’re looking for someone who has demonstrated excellence as an engineering manager, thinks beyond their own team, and wants to own the outcome, not just the delivery.

What You’ll Do

Lead engineering

• Hire, develop, and retain a senior team of product engineers. Set clear expectations, invest in their careers, and address performance directly and on time.
• Set the technical bar. Review architecture, push back on unnecessary complexity, and be deliberate about where we take on and pay down tech debt.
• Build strong relationships with peer engineering leaders across platform, data, and AI, so DC benefits from shared tooling instead of reinventing it.

Build the roadmap

• Own the DC Buying roadmap with product, design, and science leads. Balance customer asks, technical investment, and business goals.
• Know the business deeply. Understand what matters to users, moves key metrics, and how to delight customers.

Execute effectively

• Make clean commitments, internally and with customers, then hit them. Tell people early when something is going to slip.
• Turn broad goals into scoped plans with a sequence, a cost, and a date.
• Keep leadership and partner teams aware of what’s happening, and drive decisions to clarity.
• Own reliability, on-call health, and data quality for a product buyers rely on every day.

Be a great example

• Build a culture where engineers and scientists own problems, not tickets. Bring them in early with customers, product, and design rather than handing them a predetermined solution.
• Be creative in your problem solving.
• Build innovative product that delights DC buyers and drives massive customer impact.

What Makes You a Great Fit

We encourage all highly qualified candidates to apply, even if they don’t meet every listed qualification.

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years managing engineering teams.
• You have experience developing, scaling, and supporting mission-critical products in production.
• You have a strong technical range. You have experience leading across multiple functional domains (front-end, back-end, data pipelines, and applied science). You have enough depth to engage and are excited to learn.
• You’ve hired, grown, and managed performance on a team, and you’ve built a culture where engineers own problems rather than tickets.
• Clear, direct communication with stakeholders, executives, and customers.
• Comfort with ambiguity and growth-stage pressure. You can re-plan quickly when a customer or business priority shifts, without whiplashing the team.
• You use AI-native development practices day to day and want your team on the leading edge of them.

Nice to Have

• Supply chain, retail, or grocery experience, especially demand forecasting, replenishment, or inventory optimization.
• You’ve shipped forecasting, optimization, or recommendation products that operators act on every day.
• You’ve taken a product from early design partners to production at enterprise customers.
• Familiarity with our stack: Python, TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Databricks, Azure.