Technical Manager

OCLC • Dublin, OH

7d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Collective Collection Analytics team is looking for a hands-on Technical Manager to guide a growing team of software engineers. This is a player-coach role where roughly 25-40% of your time goes toward designing and building software, with the remainder spent coaching engineers, driving delivery, and ensuring operational excellence. The ideal candidate is a strong coder with deep system design experience, who can lead through influence, set technical direction, and help the team ship reliably in a modern cloud-native environment.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of professional software development experience, including 3+ years in a technical leadership role such as engineering manager or tech lead.
• Strong coding ability and system design depth, with demonstrated experience building and operating distributed services in production.
• Experience with Java and Spring Boot services, React frontend development with data visualization libraries such as HighCharts, and modern cloud-native deployment patterns such as containers and microservices.
• Strong knowledge of AWS and container orchestration through EKS or ECS, with production operations experience in observability, on-call readiness, and incident management.
• Experience with search technologies such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or SOLR, and relational databases such as PostgreSQL, Aurora, or RDS, including performance tuning and upgrade planning.
• Familiarity with API gateways and service routing, and designing stable, consumer-friendly APIs.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD and automated testing strategies in an iterative delivery environment.
• Experience with custom ETL scripting, such as Python, for data integration and pipeline automation.
• Excellent communication skills, able to explain architecture, risks, and tradeoffs to engineers, product partners, and senior stakeholders.
• Experience with Agile delivery and leading teams through iterative planning and execution.

Nice To Haves

• Strong AWS and Snowflake experience.
• Experience with Google Analytics for reporting and insights.
• Familiarity with accessibility considerations for web applications and platform UI integrations

Responsibilities

• Lead a small cross-functional team of full stack developers (Java backend, React frontend) and cloud engineers, who also cover ETL and data pipeline work, QA automation, and business systems analysis.
• Serve as the team's functional manager, handling hiring, onboarding, coaching, and performance management through regular one-on-ones and goal setting, along with career development, mentoring, and succession planning.
• Partner closely with Product Managers on roadmap execution and staffing needs, translating product direction into clear outcomes, milestones, delivery plans, and execution tradeoffs.
• Drive day-to-day execution, including creating and refining JIRA tickets with the team, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
• Own JIRA dashboard management and maintain a multi-sprint-ahead view for the team, prioritizing the backlog based on Product Manager and organizational needs and planning releases accordingly.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership and contribution through architecture and design work, technical spikes, pull requests, code reviews, pairing, and occasional end-to-end feature ownership.
• Own and evolve application and integration architecture hosted in AWS, ensuring scalability, security, maintainability, and cost awareness.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for API and service design, including REST and event-driven patterns, performance, and backward compatibility.
• Ensure production readiness and operational excellence, including monitoring, logging, incident response, root cause analysis, runbooks, and disaster recovery documentation.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and release hygiene practices, working to improve deployment frequency and reduce change failure rate.
• Define and drive an automated testing strategy across unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, and strengthen QA automation and quality gates.
• Lead ETL and data integration work across internal and external sources, including custom ETL scripts in Python, with repeatable refresh processes, automation, reconciliation, and data quality controls.
• Coordinate data platform usage and patterns in AWS, with Snowflake and Google Analytics experience preferred for data modeling, ingestion, reporting, and cost optimization.
• Implement secure-by-default development practices, including dependency and vulnerability management, secrets management, and least-privilege access patterns.
• Coordinate cross-team work with security, infrastructure, data, and partner teams, and communicate risks, progress, and tradeoffs to leadership.
• Drive capacity planning and environment strategy across development, test, stage, and production, ensuring environments support QA and performance testing needs.
• Evaluate new technologies, tools, and processes, and recommend and implement improvements for reliability, speed, quality, and cost reduction.
• Drive team-wide adoption of AI-assisted engineering workflows, including coding, testing, documentation, and code review support, within clear guardrails rather than unchecked use.
• Identify and prioritize AI-enabled automation opportunities, such as data pipeline and reporting automation, anomaly detection, reconciliation, and intelligent alerting, while ensuring responsible usage around security, privacy, intellectual property, and validation of outputs.
• Create clear metrics and reporting to track delivery, quality, and reliability trends for the team and own the financial budget as assigned.
• Maintain accountability for time reporting, budgeting inputs, and other administrative responsibilities required for ongoing team support.

Benefits

• competitive compensation that reflects your unique contributions—performance, experience, and skills
• exceptional benefits
• best-in-class health coverage
• retirement plans with generous company contributions
• a commitment to your overall well-being
• Free use of our on-site fitness center, gym sports, group exercise classes, and game room
• Onsite catering and cafeteria subsidized by OCLC
• Health and wellness events
• Paid parental leave and adoption assistance
• Tuition reimbursement and Public Service Loan Forgiveness eligibility
• Company-subsidized pricing on local tickets and memberships

What This Job Offers

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