Senior Engineering Manager of Backend Services

Whisker•Auburn Hills, MI

14d•Hybrid

About The Position

Whisker is redefining what it means to live with cats—designing intelligent systems that remove friction, elevate the everyday, and celebrate the quiet brilliance of feline companionship. Today, Litter-Robot leads the category. Tomorrow, an entire ecosystem that expands what’s possible for cats and the people who love them. We believe the future is feline. And we’re imagining that future today. We work onsite 4+ days a week, with our team based in Auburn Hills, Michigan, and Juneau, Wisconsin. Our team of 700+ passionate pet people thrives on collaboration, innovation, and the occasional office cameo from a four-legged friend. What You’ll Do: The Senior Manager, Backend Services leads the teams that own Whisker's digital experience services, robot services, core platform engineering, and IoT data intake — the cloud services that power our mobile and web app experiences and that our devices depend on to function. This leader is accountable for the reliability, scalability, and delivery predictability of those services, along with the AWS infrastructure and platform engineering that support them, while building and developing a distributed team of Whisker engineers and partner contractors. This role owns four connected domains: Digital experience services — the backend services powering the Whisker app experience that customers interact with daily: accounts, device management, scheduling, notifications, and subscription-connected functionality. Robot services — the cloud services our devices depend on to operate correctly in customers' homes, including command and control, configuration, state management, and firmware update delivery. IoT data intake — ingestion, processing, and routing of device telemetry at scale, and the pipelines that feed product analytics, diagnostics, and machine learning. Platform and AWS & GCP infrastructure — the infrastructure, deployment tooling, and observability these services run on, including cost and capacity ownership. Summary: The Senior Manager, Backend Services leads the teams responsible for Whisker’s digital experience services, robot services, IoT data intake, and underlying cloud infrastructure. This leader ensures the reliability, scalability, and delivery predictability of these mission-critical systems while developing a high-performing, distributed engineering team. Essential Duties and Responsibilities: This list of duties and responsibilities is not all-inclusive and may be expanded to include other duties and responsibilities as deemed necessary. Owns the health, roadmap, and technical direction of the digital experience services, robot services, and IoT data intake domains end to end Ensures the services' devices depend on and meet the availability and latency requirements of hardware operating in customers' homes, where a service failure is a product failure Owns the device-to-cloud contract in partnership with Firmware: telemetry schemas, command and control interfaces, versioning, and backward compatibility across a fleet that cannot all be updated at once Owns API design and evolution for the mobile and web clients, balancing client velocity against long-term service maintainability Scales IoT data intake as device volume and telemetry richness grow, managing the cost and performance tradeoffs that come with it Leads, coaches, and develops a distributed engineering team of approximately 9–15 across multiple agile pods spanning the service domains above including managing a blended workforce of Whisker full-time Team Members and partner contractors operating across multiple time zones, holding consistent standards for quality, onboarding, and accountability regardless of employment type Owns hiring, leveling, performance management, and career development for the team; partners with Talent Acquisition to strengthen the full-time core and reduce single-person dependencies Sets clear expectations and growth paths using Whisker's engineering competency framework, and identifies and develops Senior, Staff, and Lead-level talent from within the team Establishes team health following a period without direct leadership: restore clarity of ownership, a reliable feedback and one-on-one cadence, and an environment where engineers raise risks early Owns end-to-end delivery across multiple pods and service domains, ensuring predictable and well-sequenced execution against the product roadmap Partners with Product Management and Program Management/TPM to translate roadmap intent into achievable technical plans with explicit scope, sequencing, dependencies, and risk Coordinates releases that span cloud, app, and firmware, where service changes must land in step with hardware and client release trains Manages execution across time zones by setting standards for handoff quality, written communication, and documentation that keep distributed pods aligned without requiring overlapping hours Surfaces risks to commitments early and arrange effective alternatives when scope, capacity, or constraints change Owns availability, performance, and operational health across all owned services, including service level objectives, on-call rotation, incident command, and blameless postmortems Drives measurable improvement in operational and delivery quality — incident volume and severity, mean time to recovery, deployment stability, and defect escape rate Strengthens CI/CD, observability, automated testing, and code review practices so that quality and reliability emerge by default rather than through individual heroics Identifies patterns in recurring defects and outages and invests in systemic safeguards that eliminate entire classes of failure Holds contractors and partners to the same engineering standards as full-time Team Members, including documentation and test coverage, including scope definition, quality expectations, capacity planning, and budget stewardship Owns the AWS infrastructure supporting these services, including infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, observability tooling, and cloud cost and capacity planning Guides architecture and technical tradeoff decisions across services, data ingestion, and platform, in partnership with Architects and Staff and Principal engineers Remains hands-on as a player-coach: leads design reviews, participates in code review, prototypes to de-risk decisions, and steps into the codebase to unblock the team (This role is a technical leader who writes code where it has leverage, not a full-time individual contributor) Builds the technical case for platform investment and technical debt remediation, and represents that case to engineering and executive leadership Pardners with Firmware, Mobile, Quality Engineering, Data, and Product to own the customer experience across the device-to-cloud boundary Represents backend services and platform engineering to executive stakeholders, framing technical tradeoffs in terms of business impact, risk, and scalability Performs additional responsibilities when required Leadership Responsibilities: Directly supervises department Teams. Carries out supervisory responsibilities following Whisker policies and applicable laws. Responsibilities include interviewing, training, and hiring, planning, assigning and directing work, appraising performance, addressing team issues, and upholding safety and quality guidelines.

Requirements

BA/BS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, and/or equivalent years of experience
8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years directly managing engineers with ownership of hiring, performance, and career development
Demonstrated success leading backend service teams at consumer scale with distributed services and APIs supporting a large installed base of application users or devices
Expertise in API design and service architecture, including versioning and backward compatibility for clients that cannot all be upgraded at once
Experience with high-volume data ingestion and event-driven architecture (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent), including the pipelines that feed analytics and machine learning
A track record of driving measurable reliability improvement — fewer or less severe incidents, improved uptime, a healthier on-call practice, or materially more stable deployments
Experience leading distributed teams across multiple time zones, including blended teams of full-time employees and contractors or outsourced partners
Experience inheriting an existing team and improving retention, role clarity, and delivery predictability
Proven ability to recruit, level, and develop engineers, including promoting individual contributors into senior and lead roles
Current technical credibility: able to review code, lead architecture discussions, and prototype solutions independently.
Working experience with AWS infrastructure and the ability to own cloud architecture, cost, and capacity decisions for the services their team runs.
Familiarity with platform engineering practice such as infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, containerization or serverless deployment models, and observability tooling sufficient to set direction and hold quality standards
Ability to work a hybrid schedule based out of Whisker's Auburn Hills, Michigan headquarters
Maintains confidentiality of proprietary information
Ability to maintain a professional atmosphere in a fast-paced environment with numerous interactions and interruptions
A high degree of initiative, self-motivation, and ability to motivate others
Ability to establish and maintain cooperative working relationships with Team Members and colleagues
Comfortable with office pets (cats, dogs)

Nice To Haves

Strongly preferred experience with IoT or connected-device platforms, device telemetry, fleet management, over-the-air updates, MQTT or similar protocols
Background at a consumer hardware or connected-product company where software ships alongside physical product
Experience managing the firmware-to-cloud boundary and hardware-dependent release trains, including field failure analysis
Deeper platform or SRE background such as Kubernetes, ECS, Terraform, or equivalent at production scale
Experience with GraphQL and API gateway patterns
Experience with time-series or purpose-built IoT data stores
Experience transitioning a contractor-heavy team toward a stronger full-time core without disrupting delivery
Experience in a direct-to-consumer or subscription business
Prior Director of Engineering experience is welcome — this role owns a broad scope across several service domains

Responsibilities

Owns the health, roadmap, and technical direction of the digital experience services, robot services, and IoT data intake domains end to end
Ensures the services' devices depend on and meet the availability and latency requirements of hardware operating in customers' homes, where a service failure is a product failure
Owns the device-to-cloud contract in partnership with Firmware: telemetry schemas, command and control interfaces, versioning, and backward compatibility across a fleet that cannot all be updated at once
Owns API design and evolution for the mobile and web clients, balancing client velocity against long-term service maintainability
Scales IoT data intake as device volume and telemetry richness grow, managing the cost and performance tradeoffs that come with it
Leads, coaches, and develops a distributed engineering team of approximately 9–15 across multiple agile pods spanning the service domains above including managing a blended workforce of Whisker full-time Team Members and partner contractors operating across multiple time zones, holding consistent standards for quality, onboarding, and accountability regardless of employment type
Owns hiring, leveling, performance management, and career development for the team; partners with Talent Acquisition to strengthen the full-time core and reduce single-person dependencies
Sets clear expectations and growth paths using Whisker's engineering competency framework, and identifies and develops Senior, Staff, and Lead-level talent from within the team
Establishes team health following a period without direct leadership: restore clarity of ownership, a reliable feedback and one-on-one cadence, and an environment where engineers raise risks early
Owns end-to-end delivery across multiple pods and service domains, ensuring predictable and well-sequenced execution against the product roadmap
Partners with Product Management and Program Management/TPM to translate roadmap intent into achievable technical plans with explicit scope, sequencing, dependencies, and risk
Coordinates releases that span cloud, app, and firmware, where service changes must land in step with hardware and client release trains
Manages execution across time zones by setting standards for handoff quality, written communication, and documentation that keep distributed pods aligned without requiring overlapping hours
Surfaces risks to commitments early and arrange effective alternatives when scope, capacity, or constraints change
Owns availability, performance, and operational health across all owned services, including service level objectives, on-call rotation, incident command, and blameless postmortems
Drives measurable improvement in operational and delivery quality — incident volume and severity, mean time to recovery, deployment stability, and defect escape rate
Strengthens CI/CD, observability, automated testing, and code review practices so that quality and reliability emerge by default rather than through individual heroics
Identifies patterns in recurring defects and outages and invests in systemic safeguards that eliminate entire classes of failure
Holds contractors and partners to the same engineering standards as full-time Team Members, including documentation and test coverage, including scope definition, quality expectations, capacity planning, and budget stewardship
Owns the AWS infrastructure supporting these services, including infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, observability tooling, and cloud cost and capacity planning
Guides architecture and technical tradeoff decisions across services, data ingestion, and platform, in partnership with Architects and Staff and Principal engineers
Remains hands-on as a player-coach: leads design reviews, participates in code review, prototypes to de-risk decisions, and steps into the codebase to unblock the team (This role is a technical leader who writes code where it has leverage, not a full-time individual contributor)
Builds the technical case for platform investment and technical debt remediation, and represents that case to engineering and executive leadership
Partners with Firmware, Mobile, Quality Engineering, Data, and Product to own the customer experience across the device-to-cloud boundary
Represents backend services and platform engineering to executive stakeholders, framing technical tradeoffs in terms of business impact, risk, and scalability
Performs additional responsibilities when required
Directly supervises department Teams. Carries out supervisory responsibilities following Whisker policies and applicable laws. Responsibilities include interviewing, training, and hiring, planning, assigning and directing work, appraising performance, addressing team issues, and upholding safety and quality guidelines.