Senior Manager, Software Engineering

Crisis Prevention Institute•Milwaukee, WI

12d

About The Position

The Senior Manager, Software Engineering leads two or more Product Engineering squads building and operating CPI’s Integrated Training and Learning (ITL) platform, a cloud-native learning platform serving learners, Certified Instructors, and customer administrators worldwide. The platform comprises more than 30 C#/.NET microservices using CQRS and event-driven patterns, Azure Service Bus, Azure SQL, and a React single-page application. This is a hands-on leadership role accountable for team performance, delivery, operational reliability, and engineer development. The Senior Manager contributes production code, participates in design reviews and incident response, removes obstacles, sets clear expectations, and builds effective partnerships across Product, Design, Sales, Customer Success, and Enterprise Applications. Success is assessed through outcomes such as delivery predictability, deployment frequency, reliability, cost efficiency, and engineer retention and growth. The role leads improvements in delivery practices, service health, engineering standards, security and compliance, platform architecture execution, AI-assisted development, and responsible use of team resources. It also includes hiring and developing engineers, growing technical leaders, communicating progress and risks to leadership, and keeping the team connected to CPI’s mission of helping practitioners prevent crises and make people safer.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, computer science, or a related field.
At least 10 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production web applications and distributed services.
At least 3 years of direct people-management experience with software engineers, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
At least 5 years of hands-on C# and .NET experience, including ASP.NET Core and .NET 6+, with current ability to contribute production code and review designs credibly.
Experience leading teams that build and operate distributed, event-driven production systems, including message brokers such as Azure Service Bus or equivalent, idempotency, retries, and eventual consistency.
Experience with CQRS, domain-driven design, or similar patterns sufficient to maintain architectural consistency across teams.
Working familiarity with React and modern TypeScript sufficient to lead full-stack squads.
Experience building and operating services in Azure or an equivalent cloud platform; Azure examples include App Service, Functions, Service Bus, Azure SQL, Azure Monitor/Application Insights, and Key Vault. Includes cost management experience.
Demonstrated record of improving team delivery performance using measurable outcomes such as deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate, and time to restore.
Experience establishing CI/CD, automated testing, and continuous delivery practices across more than one team.
Experience owning production reliability, on-call, and incident response for customer-facing systems.
Experience adopting AI-assisted development tools on a team, setting guardrails, and measuring impact.
Experience partnering directly with product management, design, and go-to-market functions.
Experience leading a team through significant technical or organizational change.
Demonstrated yearly personal development through completing an accredited software engineering course, acquiring a software engineering-related certification, or presenting a completed learning project to the team.
Curiosity: asks why before how, investigates unfamiliar code and systems, and seeks to understand learner, instructor, and customer needs.
Ownership: takes responsibility for the health of services and features from design through production support and proactively solves problems.
Drive: ships working software in small, frequent increments and follows through to outcomes.
Experimentation: proposes and runs time-boxed experiments and uses evidence to resolve technical debates.
Learning from failure: participates openly in blameless retrospectives and incident reviews, shares lessons, and turns them into guardrails, tests, or runbooks.
Continuous improvement: improves codebases, processes, and documentation.
Ability to uphold high standards while maintaining trust through direct, respectful feedback.
Ability to make timely decisions with incomplete information, explain the reasoning, and take responsibility for outcomes.
Ability to remain technically hands-on without becoming a bottleneck and to judge when hands-on involvement is appropriate.
Ability to translate engineering work into business terms and business priorities into concrete engineering direction.
Ability to build durable cross-functional relationships without compromising engineering quality.
Ability to manage competing priorities and pursue the best outcomes for the organization.
Ability to facilitate technology evaluation and build consensus on technical standards and solutions among diverse engineers.
Demonstrated ability to attract, develop, and retain strong engineers.
Excellent verbal and written communication, effective listening, and clear, concise writing.
Strong business acumen and strategic thinking.
Genuine connection to CPI’s mission and ability to connect the team’s work to the practitioners and learners it serves.

Nice To Haves

Experience with a learning management system, EdTech, or another B2B SaaS product used at scale by end users.
Experience decoupling a product platform from an ERP/CRM system of record, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Experience managing multiple squads, a team of ten or more engineers, or other managers.
Experience with infrastructure as code, such as Bicep or Terraform, and containerized workloads.
Experience with web accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) and inclusive design.

Responsibilities

Lead two or more Product Engineering squads and their Lead Software Engineers; own team performance, health, and output.
Define and document expectations for engineering levels, squad commitments, and how performance and delivery will be measured.
Track and report operating metrics, including deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate, time to restore, SLO attainment, escaped defects, and on-call load; use metrics to identify problems rather than rank individuals.
Forecast realistically, meet commitments, surface risks early, negotiate trade-offs with product owners, and decline commitments when appropriate.
Give timely, specific feedback, recognize strong work, and address sustained underperformance fairly and decisively.
Partner with the VP of Engineering on squad capacity allocation across product work, platform investment, technical debt, and operational maintenance, supporting decisions with evidence.
Contribute production code, pair with engineers on difficult problems, and take on needed work without becoming a critical path for committed deliverables.
Participate in technical design reviews, challenge unnecessary complexity, and ensure designs address failure, observability, and cost.
Diagnose and remove blockers, including dependencies, unclear requirements, pipeline issues, and delayed decisions.
Partner with the Principal Software Engineer on target architecture, enabling squads to execute against it and communicating practical architectural challenges.
Escalate and lead significant production incidents when needed, protect responders, and communicate clearly with stakeholders.
Drive small-batch, frequent, low-risk deployments through trunk-based development, feature flags, and automated testing.
Establish and advance squad standards for testing, code review, documentation, secure coding, and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, using tooling and templates to make standards practical.
Own the operational health of squad services, including SLOs, alerting, runbooks, and sustainable, fairly shared on-call rotations.
Ensure blameless incident reviews take place and that follow-up actions are prioritized and completed.
Incrementally decouple ITL domain data from upstream enterprise systems so ITL owns production data and can deploy independently, sequencing the work alongside product delivery.
Own vulnerability remediation and compliance commitments for squad services within agreed timelines.
Manage team budgets, including headcount, tooling and vendor spending, and Azure service costs; make responsible, accountable, and defensible decisions in accordance with organizational policies.
Lead adoption of AI-assisted development, set usage and review expectations, and ensure engineers remain accountable for the quality, security, and correctness of shipped code.
Measure AI-tool adoption and impact against a baseline, using evidence about delivery speed and quality to guide decisions, including discontinuing tools that do not provide value.
Address barriers to AI adoption, model daily use, and create safe conditions for time-boxed experiments and learning from unsuccessful attempts.
Partner with the Principal Software Engineer and product leadership to identify valuable AI capabilities for ITL users and propose proofs of concept.
Build a close working partnership with Product Management and Design/UX, contribute engineering insight during discovery, and establish a shared definition of done.
Partner with Sales and Customer Success on significant customer conversations and RFPs, define escalation paths for customer-impacting issues, and route recurring support issues into the backlog.
Partner with Enterprise Applications and IT on integration and data ownership boundaries as ITL decouples from upstream systems of record.
Demonstrate squad work to business stakeholders and explain its customer and business impact in accessible terms.
Communicate candidly with the VP of Engineering and executive team about progress, risk, and cost.
Lead teams through organizational change and involve team members, including skeptics, in the transformation.
Own hiring, conduct rigorous and humane interviews, represent the mission credibly, and make hiring decisions.
Develop engineers against Senior, Lead, and Principal expectations through current growth plans, regular development-focused one-on-ones, and sponsored stretch work.
Build the leadership bench by developing Lead Software Engineers and identifying future managers.
Understand retention risks and reasons, and take action before employees resign.
Model learning from failure by openly acknowledging mistakes and turning lessons into guardrails rather than blame.
Perform other position-related duties as assigned.