Manager, Software Engineering

Description

The company is hiring a software engineering manager to lead teams building the next generation of its retail commerce platform, which covers AI-native developer tooling, an agentic platform layer, and an operating model in which engineering is fully accountable for delivery.

The job level, from first-line manager up to senior manager, depends on your experience, the size of the team you lead, and the complexity of the product. Engineers moving into management for the first time and experienced managers who lead large groups are both welcome to apply.

The software runs in tens of thousands of retail stores worldwide and supports point of sale, mobile, self-service, and back-of-store operations for many of the largest retailers. You have probably used it if you have checked out at a large warehouse club, a big-box retailer, or a global grocery or apparel chain.

The company is a billion-dollar global business headquartered in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and it is the market share leader in in-store retail solutions.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery, quality, and team health for one or more product areas within the platform.
• Run engineering execution: the milestone plan, sprint tracking, technical risk, and quality. You are accountable for these outcomes.
• Hire, grow, and evaluate engineers, set their pay, plan their careers, and have difficult conversations early.
• Stay close enough to the code to contribute in design reviews, debug production issues, and challenge technical tradeoffs.
• Work with Principal Engineers to set engineering standards.
• Know the architecture, the backlog, your customers, and how the product performs in the market.
• Handle customer escalations in your scope and meet the agreed SLAs.

Requirements

• 5-10+ years of software development experience, including 3-10 years in a leadership or manager role.
• A bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or an equivalent field.
• A strong 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.
• Experience leading software engineers, either as a manager or as a tech lead, staff engineer, or senior individual contributor who has owned end-to-end delivery for a team's scope. You have hired, developed, managed performance, and when needed, let go of engineers.
• Working knowledge of modern Agile delivery, the SDLC, and CI/CD in a continuous-deployment environment.
• The ability to move between architecture and debugging, and between executive reviews and sprint standups, within the same day.
• A record of leading through uncertainty, owning missed commitments openly, and recovering from production incidents.
• Excellent written and verbal communication: you write concise status updates, run focused meetings, and present tradeoffs that executives can act on.
• A direct, low-ego, honest style. You disagree 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, point of sale, 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

Engineering owns delivery. The leadership chain from VP to Senior Director, Director, engineering manager, and engineers is accountable for outcomes, and there is no project management office setting the schedule. Control and accountability sit together.

Technical Program Managers, Quality, DevOps, and Principal Engineers support delivery by coordinating, automating, architecting, and removing blockers. They do not own delivery.

The team invests heavily in AI tooling for status tracking, risk detection, test generation, and reporting, with the aim of reducing coordination overhead for engineers and managers. AI does not remove your accountability.

You drive the plan, identify the risks, and ship the product, rather than handing status to a project manager or waiting for someone else to define what the team builds.

You must be located near or within the Raleigh-Durham area.

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

The base salary range is $130,000-$200,000 per year. This is a general guideline. The final offer depends on factors such as the scope of the role, your experience, education and training, work location, and market and business conditions.

Benefits

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