Engineering Manager

Ortho2.•Ames, IA

10d•Hybrid

About The Position

Ortho2 is the industry leader in orthodontic practice management software, serving thousands of practices that depend on our platform for their day-to-day success. We’re a small, close-knit company where engaged employees are the foundation of everything we do. Our atmosphere is laid back, roles are flexible, and ownership is readily available. This is a relatively new position, which means you won’t inherit a playbook. You’ll help define the role as you grow into it. As Engineering Manager, you’ll lead a ~10-person team of Software Developers, Senior Engineers, and a UI/UX. We have additional positions to fill, so you’ll likely be shaping the team from your first weeks. You’ll own their growth, their performance, and the health of how they work. This is a hands-on role. You’ll be in design discussions regularly, and technical credibility with senior engineers is a core requirement, not a nice-to-have. The VP of Development will drive architecture and technical strategy. You own the team that executes it, and the partnership between those two seats is the backbone of this job.

Requirements

8+ years building software, with meaningful depth in .NET and React a plus.
Recent enough hands-on work to earn the respect of senior engineers in a code review
3+ years managing software engineers, including real hiring and performance-management outcomes
A track record of raising a team’s productivity bar. Coaching people to new skill levels, and when necessary, managing people out with honesty and dignity
Comfort operating without a playbook: adapting process, priorities, and your own role as needs change
Fluency with AI-assisted development and what it changes about how teams work

Nice To Haves

Modernizing a long-lived product while it stayed in production
Multi-tenant B2B SaaS experience
Leading a team’s adoption of AI development tooling
Experience partnering closely with UI/UX designers
WPF or desktop application background

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and grow the development team: 1:1s, growth plans, performance management, and hiring
Stay hands-on: participate in architecture discussions, review code, and occasionally deploy
Own team capability: honestly assess skills against where our platform is heading, invest heavily in developing people, and make the hard calls when investment isn’t working, including hiring the engineers the platform needs
Champion modern engineering practice: strong review culture, a real quality bar, and AI-assisted development as a first-class part of how the team works
Keep delivery healthy with lightweight, adaptive process; fit the process to the team and the moment, not the other way around
Occasionally represent engineering in technical conversations with vendors and enterprise customers