Engineering Manager, Developer Experience

ECP•Chicago, IL

1d•Remote

About The Position

ECP is a market-leading SaaS solution that enables senior living communities to better care for their residents, used in over 8,000 communities. The company is expanding by increasing customer numbers and the scope of services through new product development. Senior living is under-penetrated with software, and ECP is a major player in this growing industry. Having recently secured a growth equity round, ECP is reinvesting in its product, technology, and go-to-market strategy with a mission to improve seniors' quality of life and enhance customer performance. The Foundation Engineering team is a new platform capability at ECP responsible for the entire code-to-production path, including the CI/CD pipeline, deployment environments, test automation framework, and observability tooling. Currently, the CI/CD process is fragmented across Bitbucket Pipelines and Jenkins, environments are shared and unstable, automated tests are written by QA on behalf of delivery teams, and existing monitoring tools (Sentry, CloudWatch) are limited to error tracking and infrastructure metrics. The role involves rebuilding these systems without disrupting the existing product. Newer product surfaces will be prioritized for migration, while older, clinical surfaces will be migrated last, once a robust safety net is in place. This is a hands-on role where significant time will be spent writing infrastructure code and building tooling. The manager will have an open requisition for one engineer to join them, and two SDETs will be partnered on the test framework, reporting to the VP of Platform Engineering. This player-coach role will involve building and managing a team of 2-4 people over time while maintaining a hands-on approach to setting technical standards. The technology stack includes Node and TypeScript for new code, with ongoing migration from a legacy ColdFusion platform. The data layer uses SQL Server and PostgreSQL. The architecture is a mix of monolith and services, adopting domain-driven design and an event-driven architecture, all hosted on AWS. The pipeline and tooling must support both the legacy and new stacks, though the manager will not be writing ColdFusion.

Requirements

Previous leadership experience in a developer experience or platform engineering function, with demonstrable measurable impact.
Deep experience with AWS and infrastructure-as-code.
Sufficient command of CI/CD to redesign systems rather than maintain existing ones.
Experience successfully transitioning testing from a QA-owned function to an engineer-owned one, ensuring adoption.
Familiarity with AI-assisted development, understanding its limitations and the need for human oversight.
Experience managing or leading a small team of engineers while remaining hands-on with code.
Ability to set technical standards and maintain a hands-on approach.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a HIPAA-regulated or other compliance-sensitive environment.
Experience with contract testing or service virtualization in an event-driven system.
Familiarity with Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions.
Experience with SQL Server and PostgreSQL at production scale.
Experience with ColdFusion.

Responsibilities

Consolidate CI/CD onto a single system for all delivery teams.
Reduce build and deploy times.
Own the AWS and CloudFormation infrastructure supporting the delivery pipeline.
Implement dependency scanning, secrets detection, and static analysis as default steps in every build.
Provide teams with feature flags to separate deployment from release.
Improve the developer platform, starting with the engineer's local machine (environment setup, build speed, pre-pipeline tools).
Replace shared environments with ephemeral ones and solve multi-tenant test data seeding for usability.
Implement contract testing for the event bus to enable service isolation testing.
Establish opinionated, documented 'golden paths' for building, testing, and deploying services.
Drive toward self-service and an internal developer portal.
Operate the platform as a product with a visible roadmap, feedback channels, and reliability standards.
Transition the test automation framework from QA ownership to direct use by delivery engineers.
Build the logging, tracing, metrics, and alerting stack for production ownership, providing visibility without direct data access.
Develop audited 'break-glass' paths for critical incident response.
Enhance the effectiveness of AI-assisted development tools by optimizing the agentic development loop (deterministic local builds, fast test feedback, repo context, sandboxed execution, review gates, internal platform capabilities via MCP).