Sr. Manager, Software Engineering

Innovation Associates, Inc. • US,

12d • $148,750 - $201,250

About The Position

Lead a small software engineering team modernizing the NEXiA platform — a customer-deployed pharmacy automation system that has evolved through several technology generations. The work is incremental decomposition of a .NET/VB6-era codebase into well-bounded modules, shipped to on-prem customer environments where upgrade safety and backward compatibility are non-negotiable.

The day-one reality: the team is capable but the delivery machinery around it is uneven. Standards vary across repos, test coverage is inconsistent, and release discipline depends more on individual habits than on shared process. The mission is to turn this into a team that ships predictably — clear ownership, reviewed code, tested changes, boring releases.

This is a player-coach role. You will lead the team and you will personally write and review code every week. Candidates whose hands-on work ended when they became managers are not a fit for this role.

The engineering environment here is code-driven end to end: environments are provisioned through Terraform and Ansible, builds and deploys run through GitHub Actions, and the product ships to customers as a versioned VM. You won’t own that substrate — a peer infrastructure team does — but you can’t lead effectively here while treating it as a black box. You need to understand what infrastructure as code is and the role it plays in this ecosystem: why environments are code-driven, what the pipeline does between commit and customer, and how to hold your team accountable for the operability of what they ship. Being able to read the Terraform yourself is a bonus, not the bar.

Finally: this team is pushing boundaries, particularly in agentic tooling, where the state of the art changes monthly. That requires someone who leans in — who learns by trying, breaks things in the process, and treats those mistakes as tuition rather than something to apologize for. Curiosity here is not a personality bonus; it’s how the work gets done.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years leading engineers while remaining hands-on
• Strong proficiency in a statically-typed OO language (C#/.NET strongly preferred; Java or similar accepted with willingness to ramp)
• Experience modernizing or maintaining long-lived production systems — you’ve worked at the boundary between legacy and modern code, not exclusively greenfield
• Experience shipping customer-deployed or on-prem software: upgrade paths, backward compatibility, long-lived versions
• DevOps literacy: understands what infrastructure as code is and its role in a modern delivery ecosystem — why environments are provisioned from code, what CI/CD pipelines do between commit and deploy, and what it takes to make software operable in environments you don’t control
• Track record of raising a team’s engineering discipline — review culture, testing standards, release predictability — with concrete before/after evidence
• Real agentic development experience: daily-driver use of an agentic coding CLI (Claude Code, Codex, or opencode), with concrete examples and a clear verification discipline — either an experienced power user or a demonstrated rapid adopter
• Player-coach disposition with evidence: recent commits, recent incidents worked, recent code reviewed — leadership that stayed technical
• Demonstrated learning agility: a track record of self-driven adoption of unfamiliar technology — picked it up, shipped with it, made mistakes along the way, and can talk about those mistakes without flinching

Nice To Haves

• Reading fluency in Terraform or Ansible — can follow a plan or a role and spot what it changes (authoring experience even better)
• Experience with domain-driven design: bounded contexts, anti-corruption layers, strangler-fig migrations
• Experience shipping software as a virtual appliance or supporting customer-hosted deployments
• Healthcare, pharmacy, or regulated-environment experience
• Observability practice: metrics, logging, and alerting as part of the definition of done
• Experience partnering with (or having owned) a platform/infrastructure team
• Built agentic tooling, not just used it: custom Claude Code skills/slash commands, plugins, subagent definitions, hooks, or MCP servers — especially ones that encode infrastructure or operations workflows
• Designed multi-agent or automated agentic workflows (e.g., agents that plan/apply infrastructure changes, review Terraform plans, or run unattended remediation loops with guardrails)
• Contributions to agentic tooling ecosystems (published plugins, MCP servers, or skills; upstream contributions to agent frameworks)

Responsibilities

• Hire, mentor, and lead a small software engineering team while remaining in the code yourself
• Set technical direction through working examples — the patterns you establish in code review and your own commits are the ones the team follows
• Create clear ownership and accountability: who owns which modules, who makes which decisions, what “done” means
• Address performance issues directly and early; a small team can’t carry passengers
• Represent engineering reality to leadership — honest capacity, honest timelines, honest risk
• Own sprint-to-sprint execution: planning, sequencing, and unblocking so the team ships predictably
• Establish and enforce engineering practices — pull-request review discipline, meaningful test coverage, incremental delivery over big-bang merges
• Drive releases that are routine, not events: staged rollouts, rollback paths, and validation against the customer configurations that actually exist
• Prioritize ruthlessly: modernization scope always exceeds capacity, so sequencing (what gets decomposed first, what stays legacy for now) is a core management skill here
• Guide the incremental decomposition of legacy NEXiA capabilities into bounded, testable modules without disrupting active customers
• Make and defend architectural trade-offs between isolation and pragmatism — not every boundary needs a rewrite
• Design for customer-deployed constraints: long-lived versions, upgrade paths, backward compatibility, customer-specific configurations
• Partner with Product and Quality so modernization work aligns with customer impact, not just architectural preference
• Understand the infrastructure-as-code substrate the team builds on: what Terraform and Ansible manage, which changes affect your team’s environments, and when to pull in the infrastructure team
• Treat CI/CD as part of the engineering system you manage — hold the team accountable for pipeline health, build times, and flaky tests rather than treating them as someone else’s problem
• Ensure what the team ships is operable: logging, diagnostics, and upgrade behavior are reviewed as part of the work, not discovered in the field
• Partner with the infrastructure team on environment needs — self-service test environments, image pipeline requirements, deployment automation — as an informed customer, not a bystander
• Work agentically as the default mode: direct coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, opencode) to understand legacy code, draft decompositions, and generate migration scaffolding — then verify everything against real system behavior before it ships
• Enforce verification discipline on the team: AI will confidently generate a plausible-looking characterization of undocumented code that is subtly wrong; tests, behavior comparison, and staged rollout are the ground truth, not the generated code
• Extend the agentic tooling itself where it pays off — custom skills, slash commands, agents, and hooks that encode the team’s workflows so the leverage compounds
• Evolve the team’s workflow as tooling changes — throughput here depends on leverage, not headcount

Benefits

• Generous time off policy that allows you to put your family first
• Opportunity to work on the cutting edge of pharmacy automation in a high growth tech company
• Competitive benefits, salary, and talent development opportunities
• Commitment to professional development and working for a company where your voice is heard

What This Job Offers

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