Senior Engineering Manager

Responsive • Beaverton, OR

20h

About The Position

Responsive is seeking a hands-on Senior Engineering Manager to lead multiple engineering teams and own the technical outcomes of a major product area, such as its RFP management module or AI modules. This technical leadership role combines approximately 30% hands-on work—including architecture, design and code reviews, prototyping, implementation, and resolving critical production issues—with leading managers, tech leads, and engineers. The role sets technical direction, develops future engineering leaders, and is accountable for delivery, quality, and reliability.

The Senior Engineering Manager defines the product area's technical vision and roadmap across Java, React, and MongoDB, and makes architecture and design decisions that span teams. They lead hiring and team development, guide production AI and agentic capabilities, improve delivery and quality practices, and establish reliability, observability, performance, security, and AI governance standards. The role partners with product and customer-facing teams to turn customer needs into engineering plans and communicate clearly through escalations.

Responsive describes a global flexible workforce model and lists offices in Dallas, Kansas City, Coimbatore, and Dublin. The position's compensation range is $185,000–$200,000; the applicable range is determined based on location and shared during the hiring process.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• 14+ years of software development experience.
• 5+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing managers or multiple teams.
• Hands-on technical leadership with significant ongoing coding contributions.
• Experience building and shipping AI agents or AI-driven systems in production.
• Experience owning and operating high-scale, highly available, multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Strong expertise in Java and React for full-stack enterprise application development.
• Experience with MongoDB and solid knowledge of relational and NoSQL database design.
• Experience designing and implementing AI-powered applications using LLMs, RAG architectures, AI agents, and workflow automation.
• Ability to hire, lead, and develop engineers and engineering leaders and build accountable, high-performing teams.
• Experience setting technical direction, running architecture reviews, and enforcing engineering best practices across teams.
• Strong experience with observability and monitoring tools such as OpenSearch, Splunk, New Relic, or OpenTelemetry-based stacks.
• Hands-on cloud-native development experience on AWS, GCP, or Azure, including Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code.
• Strong understanding of scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, and performance optimization.
• Proficiency in CI/CD, TDD, and DevOps practices.
• Strong problem-solving, decision-making, and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to communicate clearly to executives and engineers.
• Experience leading teams in Agile environments, with practical knowledge of Scrum and Jira.

Nice To Haves

• Knowledge of search and retrieval technologies such as Elasticsearch and Apache Solr.
• AI-driven search and NLP experience.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical vision and roadmap for the product area across Java, React, and MongoDB, and make architecture and design decisions that cross team boundaries.
• Contribute hands-on to architecture, design and code reviews, prototyping, implementation, critical-path work, and resolution of difficult production issues; the role allocates roughly 30% of time to this work.
• Manage engineering managers, tech leads, and engineers; set expectations, conduct performance reviews, coach, and develop future engineering leaders.
• Own team hiring end to end, assess hires during the three-month probation period, write 90-day reports with recommendations, and make exit decisions when hires are not working out.
• Guide the design and delivery of AI agents and LLM-powered capabilities, including RAG pipelines, tool calling, and workflow automation, with evaluation, grounding, and cost controls.
• Own predictable delivery of roadmap commitments and engineering quality; reduce the backlog, close process gaps, and work with Quality Engineering on test automation, release readiness, and quality gates.
• Set monitoring, logging, and tracing standards; own incident response and root-cause analysis; and optimize performance and costs for cloud-based, multi-tenant systems.
• Ensure tenant isolation, access control, and secure data handling are included in designs, and work with Security and GRC on AI governance expectations.
• Partner with product managers, designers, support, customer success, and solutions teams to translate customer needs into engineering plans and handle escalations with clear communication.
• Promote coding, TDD, CI/CD, DevOps, and agile practices, and use AI-assisted development tools to improve team productivity.

Benefits

• 401k with company matching.
• Unlimited professional development and ongoing learning through LinkedIn Learning Solutions.
• Four weeks of paid vacation, paid sick days, and paid bereavement.
• Four-week sabbatical after five years of service.
• Mental Wellness Program (EAP) to support well-being and self-care.
• Team events, including happy hours, off-sites, and team-building events.
• Health benefits described as best-in-class, paid for employees, with company contribution for family coverage.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior