Manager, Software Engineering, SaaS

Airlock Digital • Denver, CO

1d

About The Position

Airlock Digital is seeking an engineering manager to lead its SaaS team. The role owns the technical direction and delivery of the cloud platform, as well as the performance, growth, and health of the engineering team. The manager will foster clear ownership and decision-making authority while guiding a platform that connects web-based administration, policy and allowlisting workflows, endpoint communications, and execution data. The platform should evolve with customer needs and usage, with emphasis on security, reliability, and a consistent customer experience.

The manager will lead and develop engineers across countries and career levels, set technical direction, guide architecture, and provide hands-on technical leadership when it has the greatest impact. They will balance product delivery with security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and technical-debt reduction; improve engineering practices; and partner with SRE, DevOps, product, QA, security, support, and server and endpoint teams. The position also involves leading challenging customer and production investigations and using operational evidence and customer feedback to drive lasting improvements.

The role is offered across San Francisco, Denver, Dallas, Boston, Atlanta, or US Remote. Airlock Digital describes its team as humble, collaborative, and driven, and says it values flexibility, trust, and an empowering work environment. Benefits vary by location and eligibility. A bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field is preferred but not required; equivalent practical experience is welcome.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of experience designing, building, shipping, and sustaining production software, including cloud services or SaaS products.
• Strong engineering judgment across application architecture, APIs, data, and operational reliability.
• Experience guiding teams across backend services and modern web applications.
• Ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs, evolve service boundaries, and improve testing, delivery automation, and observability while continuing to deliver customer value.
• Sound understanding of distributed systems and data-intensive applications, including data modeling, asynchronous processing, consistency, and failure recovery.
• Ability to guide decisions about scalability, performance, and safe changes to production data.
• Experience building secure cloud applications, with sound judgment about tenant isolation, authentication, authorization, API security, and protection of customer data.
• Familiarity with operating cloud services, including incident response, safe deployments, and availability.
• At least 3 years managing a small software engineering team, including coaching engineers at different career levels, delegation, performance feedback, career development, difficult conversations, hiring, and team health.
• Principal-level technical leadership experience setting durable direction, resolving architectural tradeoffs, mentoring senior engineers, influencing beyond the immediate team, and aligning technical decisions with business and customer needs.
• Clear written and verbal communication, sound judgment, and experience leading distributed teams.
• Ability to document decisions, explain technical tradeoffs, communicate risks early, and build alignment across engineering, product, customer-facing teams, and time zones.

Nice To Haves

• A bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field is preferred but not required; equivalent practical experience is welcome.
• Experience with Go backend services or another language used to build distributed production systems.
• Familiarity with Angular and TypeScript, or comparable web application technologies, and experience guiding collaboration between frontend and backend engineers.
• Experience with MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, or comparable technologies for data storage, caching, and asynchronous processing.
• Familiarity with Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes, containers, and automated delivery practices such as Helm and GitOps, or equivalent cloud environments and tooling.
• Experience with application control, allowlisting, endpoint protection, or another cybersecurity product where secure failure behavior, auditability, and reliability matter.
• Experience with enterprise identity and access management, secure API integrations, or platforms that coordinate policies and data across large endpoint fleets.
• Experience with high-volume event ingestion, reporting, data retention, or observability tools such as Elastic APM.
• Experience modernizing a production platform while continuing to serve customers.

Responsibilities

• Set the SaaS platform's technical direction and translate product, security, and customer priorities into executable plans.
• Guide architecture across web applications, APIs, backend services, and data processing, including service boundaries, tenant isolation, and reliability.
• Lead and develop a group of engineers across countries and career levels.
• Create an accountable, psychologically safe team through clear expectations, one-on-ones, candid feedback, career development, and support for hiring and onboarding.
• Provide technical leadership through design and code reviews, architectural decisions, and complex production investigations.
• Coach engineers to make sound decisions and contribute directly where involvement will have the greatest impact.
• Evolve the platform while balancing delivery with security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and focused technical-debt reduction.
• Partner with SRE and DevOps on safe releases, data migrations, rollback plans, capacity, and cloud operating costs.
• Improve execution through clear priorities, realistic plans, early risk management, and consistent follow-through.
• Strengthen documentation, testing, delivery automation, observability, secure development, release readiness, production support, and responsible use of AI-assisted tools.
• Lead challenging customer and production investigations across services, data pipelines, web workflows, and endpoint communications.
• Use operational evidence and customer feedback to turn recurring failures into lasting improvements.
• Partner with product management, QA, SRE, DevOps, security, support, Server, and endpoint teams to coordinate delivery, resolve dependencies, and improve customer outcomes.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance (availability varies by location and eligibility).
• 401K plan with 4% company match.
• Life and disability programs.
• Paid parental leave.
• Paid time off and paid holidays.
• Volunteer and birthday time off.
• Home office allowance.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed