Software Engineering Manager

About Career Team

At Career Team, we are building software that improves access to opportunity, workforce development, and support systems at scale. Through Career Edge, we help connect people with tools and services that can change lives.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a hands-on Software Engineering Manager to lead a high-performing engineering team building and supporting Career Edge. This role is ideal for a strong technical leader who enjoys people management, shipping product, and improving team execution.

This is not a company-wide executive leadership role. Instead, it is focused on:

• Owning delivery for a defined product or platform area
• Managing engineers directly
• Improving engineering quality and velocity
• Partnering closely with Product, Design, QA, and U.S.-based stakeholders

What You'll Do

Team Leadership & Delivery

• Lead cross-functional engineering teams
• Own sprint planning, execution, delivery quality, and risk management
• Partner with Product and Design to turn roadmap priorities into executable plans
• Remove blockers and improve team operating rhythm across a distributed environment
• Drive visibility, predictability, and accountability for committed work

Agile Process & Team Operating Rhythm

• Establish and continuously improve a disciplined Scrum/Agile process — sprint planning, backlog refinement, daily standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives that actually change behavior
• Partner with Product to keep the backlog groomed, well-estimated, and prioritized at least one to two sprints ahead
• Drive accurate estimation and sprint commitment; track velocity, throughput, and cycle time to make delivery predictable rather than optimistic
• Enforce clear definitions of ready and done, including test coverage, code review, and documentation standards
• Run blameless retrospectives and close the loop on action items sprint over sprint
• Adapt ceremonies to a distributed, night-shift team — async-first updates, tight written communication, and minimal meeting overhead
• Coach engineers on breaking work into small, independently shippable increments

Technical Guidance

• Provide technical leadership across the team's modern web stack and cloud infrastructure
• Review designs, architecture proposals, and critical code paths
• Support scalable, secure, and maintainable system design within your team's domain
• Improve engineering practices around CI/CD, code review, observability, testing, and incident response
• Use delivery metrics such as DORA (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore) to identify bottlenecks and guide improvement

AI-Enabled Engineering

• Champion AI adoption across the SDLC — planning, code generation, review, testing, documentation, and incident response
• Set standards for responsible AI-assisted development: what gets reviewed, how quality bars hold, and where human judgment is non-negotiable
• Evaluate and roll out AI tooling (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, agentic workflows, MCP-based integrations) and measure real impact on velocity and quality
• Coach engineers to shift from writing every line to specifying, reviewing, and validating AI-generated work
• Stay current as tooling evolves rapidly and bring practical ideas back to the team

People Management

• Manage, coach, and develop software engineers through regular 1:1s, feedback, and growth plans
• Support performance management, hiring, onboarding, and retention
• Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, code quality, and continuous learning
• Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with U.S.-based stakeholders during overlap hours
• Partner with Product, QA, DevOps, and business teams to keep delivery aligned with company goals
• Communicate tradeoffs, risks, and delivery status clearly to technical and non-technical partners

What We're Looking For

Experience

• 6+ years in software engineering
• 2–4+ years leading teams as an Engineering Manager, Team Lead, or equivalent
• Experience delivering production software in a SaaS, web platform, or product-led environment
• Experience working with distributed or remote teams
• Demonstrated track record implementing or maturing Scrum/Agile practice on a team that previously lacked it

Technical Background

Required

• Strong full-stack engineering background in the JavaScript / TypeScript ecosystem
• Hands-on experience with Node.js and React / Next.js, and with designing and consuming APIs
• Experience running production workloads on a major cloud platform (AWS preferred)
• Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and modern software delivery workflows
• Strong understanding of maintainable architecture, delivery tradeoffs, and engineering quality

Nice to Have

• Nest.js
• MongoDB and/or MySQL at production scale
• Docker and containerized deployment
• Broader DevOps and infrastructure-as-code practices

Leadership Traits

• Strong communicator and coach
• Comfortable balancing speed, quality, and business priorities
• Able to go deep technically without becoming a bottleneck
• Calm under ambiguity and effective in a fast-moving environment
• Genuinely passionate about AI — actively experimenting, and opinionated about where it helps and where it doesn't

Why Join

• Build technology that impacts real lives
• Work with a mission-driven global team
• Stay close to product and code while growing as a leader
• Help shape how Career Team scales its engineering organization
• Work somewhere AI is genuinely embraced — you will have the mandate and the tooling to modernize how software gets built here