Software Engineering Manager - Fleet Management

Nscale•Seattle, WA

20h•$300,000 - $350,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Nscale is seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for building Fleet Manager, a workflow automation platform. This platform manages the provisioning, testing, and remediation of GPU nodes and network switches at scale. The role involves leading engineers who develop Python-based systems for the entire operational lifecycle of compute infrastructure, including device enrollment, burn-in testing, network configuration, GPU health monitoring, and automated remediation. The manager will own end-to-end delivery and team health, including planning, execution, hiring, and career development, while collaborating with Principal and Staff engineers on technical architecture. The culture is hands-on, with the manager expected to stay involved through design reviews, incident deep-dives, and code, with people leadership as the primary focus.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
2+ years directly managing software engineers.
Strong technical foundation in Python and distributed systems.
Credible in design and code reviews, and able to guide trade-offs in infrastructure automation or workflow tooling.
Track record of delivering complex projects from ambiguous requirements to production.
Hands-on day-2 operations experience (monitoring, incident response, performance optimization).
Proven people leadership: hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing engineers.
Driven by building distributed systems at scale, infrastructure reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement.
Experience using AI tools like Claude or Cursor as a core part of workflow and raising team leverage with them.
Ability to context-switch between technical depth, delivery judgment calls, and people leadership.
Excellent communication skills to build consensus with stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading teams that build workflow orchestration systems (Temporal, Airflow, Prefect, or similar).
Hands-on experience with infrastructure tooling: DCIMs, NetBox, OpenStack, or ERP systems.
Bare-metal provisioning and automation: MAAS, Ironic, IPMI, PXE boot, or network automation.
Experience building or managing hardware lifecycle automation: provisioning, validation, testing, or remediation workflows.
GPU infrastructure experience: health monitoring, burn-in testing, or cluster management.
HPC and networking: datacenter topology, high-performance interconnects (InfiniBand, RoCE).
Working knowledge of Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi), AWS, and GCP.
Experience scaling a team through rapid growth: hiring pipelines, onboarding, and team processes that hold up under pressure.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow the team by hiring, onboarding, and developing software engineers.
Coach performance and career growth, set clear expectations, and manage performance.
Own on-call health, handover quality, and a sustainable operational load for the team.
Turn the Fleet Manager roadmap into executable plans, driving prioritization, managing dependencies and risks, and meeting commitments.
Run the team's planning, review, and escalation mechanisms, and remove blockers.
Communicate status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to stakeholders.
Uphold engineering standards, including code review, testing, CI/CD, incident response, and postmortems.
Own the operational health of the team's services, including SLOs, observability, alerting, and incident management.
Partner with Principal and Staff engineers on architecture and design decisions.
Stay hands-on by reviewing designs and code, digging into incidents, and writing code where it unblocks the team.
Collaborate with Product, Infrastructure, Platform, SRE, and UI/UX teams.
Champion AI tools like Claude and Cursor across the team.