Manager, Software Engineering

Description

The company builds the retail commerce platform behind point of sale, mobile, self-service, and back-of-store operations for many of the world's largest retailers. Its software runs in tens of thousands of stores worldwide, so you have likely used it at a warehouse club, a big-box retailer, a grocery chain, or an apparel brand.

You will lead teams working on ELERA's next phase: AI-native development tooling, an agentic platform layer, and an operating model modeled on FAANG practices, where engineering is responsible for delivery from start to finish.

The role is scoped to your experience, the size of your team, and the complexity of the product. First-line managers stepping up from tech lead roles and senior managers who already lead large groups are both welcome to apply.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery, quality, and team health for one or more product areas within ELERA.
• Drive engineering execution, including the milestone plan, sprint tracking, technical risk, and quality. You are accountable for the outcome.
• Hire, develop, and manage the performance and pay of your engineers, plan their careers, and handle difficult conversations early.
• Stay technical enough to contribute in design reviews, debug production issues, and challenge tradeoffs. Work with Principal Engineers to set standards.
• Know the architecture, the backlog, your customers, and how the product performs in the market.
• Take ownership of customer escalations in your scope and meet the SLAs for them.

Requirements

• Required: 5-10+ years of software development experience, including 3-10 years in a leadership or manager role.
• Required: a bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or an equivalent field.
• Required: a solid software engineering background, with a record of shipping production systems at scale and the ability to discuss deep technical topics with senior engineers and Principal-level architects.
• Required: experience leading engineers, either as a manager or as a tech lead, staff engineer, or senior IC who has owned end-to-end delivery for a team's scope. You have hired, developed, managed performance, and when necessary, exited engineers.
• Required: working knowledge of modern Agile delivery, the SDLC, and CI/CD in a continuous-deployment environment.
• Required: the ability to move between architecture and debugging, and between an executive review and a sprint standup, within the same day.
• Required: a history of leading through ambiguity, owning missed commitments openly, and recovering from production incidents.
• Required: excellent written and verbal communication. You write concise status updates, run focused meetings, and present tradeoffs at an executive level.
• Required: you are direct, low ego, and honest. You voice disagreement clearly, commit fully once a decision is made, and tell people the truth.
• Highly preferred: experience with AI-assisted development workflows, such as coding agents, AI-driven test generation, RAG-based developer tooling, or agentic CI/CD.
• Highly preferred: experience with retail, payments, POS, or other transaction-critical systems.
• Highly preferred: familiarity with Java/Spring Boot, Node.js/TypeScript, Docker, Kubernetes on Azure AKS, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, and MongoDB.
• Highly preferred: experience leading distributed or multi-site teams.

Conditions

The role is based near or within the Raleigh-Durham area.

The company will not sponsor visas now or in the future. You must be able to work in the United States without current or future visa sponsorship.

Engineering owns delivery. The vertical chain of VP, Senior Director, Director, EM, and engineers is accountable for outcomes, and there is no PMO setting schedules. Authority and accountability sit together.

Horizontal teams support delivery but do not own it. Technical Program Managers, Quality, DevOps, and Principal Engineers coordinate, automate, architect, and remove blockers, while you run the end-to-end delivery.

AI is used to reduce overhead, not accountability. The company invests in agentic tools for status tracking, risk detection, test generation, and reporting to lower the coordination load on engineers and managers.

You will drive the plan, call out risks, and ship the product. You will not hand status to a project manager, walk a PMO through milestones, or wait for a TPM to tell you what your team is building.

The company is a billion-dollar global firm headquartered in Research Triangle Park, NC, supplying retail store solutions. Its customers include major grocery, warehouse club, big-box, fuel rewards, and apparel brands worldwide, and it holds the largest installed market share in the industry.

Base salary range: $130,000-$200,000. This is a general guideline. The final offer depends on factors such as role scope, the candidate's experience, education and training, work location, and market and business conditions.

Eligible for an annual discretionary performance bonus based on individual and company results.

Benefits

• Group health coverage: medical, dental, and vision.
• Employee assistance programs.
• Pre-tax spending accounts.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Company-paid life insurance.
• Pet insurance.
• Employee discounts.
• Generous paid holidays, paid vacation, and paid sick and personal days.