Manager, Software Engineering

Description

The company builds ELERA, a retail commerce platform that runs point of sale, mobile, self-service and back-of-store operations at tens of thousands of retail stores worldwide, for many of the world's largest retailers. You have likely used its products at a warehouse club self-checkout, a big-box retailer register, or a grocery or apparel chain.

The role leads teams working on the next phase of ELERA: AI-native development tooling, an agentic platform layer, and an operating model in which engineering owns delivery from start to finish. The seniority is set by your experience, team size and product complexity, ranging from first-time managers who have been tech leads to senior managers of large groups. Both are encouraged to apply.

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.

You must live near or within the Cincinnati, OH area.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery, quality and team health for one or more product areas within ELERA.
• Accountable for execution: the milestone plan, sprint tracking, technical risk and quality.
• Hire, develop, compensate and manage performance, including difficult conversations, and act early on problems.
• Stay technical enough to contribute in design reviews, debug production issues and challenge tradeoffs. Set standards with Principal Engineers.
• Know the architecture, backlog, customers and market performance of your product area.
• Own customer escalations in your scope and meet their SLAs.

Requirements

• 5 to 10+ years in software development, including 3 to 10 years in a leadership or manager role.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering or an equivalent field.
• Strong software engineering background with a record of shipping production systems at scale, able to discuss deep technical topics with senior engineers and principal architects.
• Experience leading engineers as a manager, tech lead, staff engineer or senior IC who owned end-to-end delivery for a team's scope, including hiring, developing, managing performance and, when needed, exiting engineers.
• Working knowledge of modern Agile delivery, the SDLC and CI/CD in a continuous-deployment environment.
• Able to move between architecture and debugging, and between executive reviews and sprint standups, within the same day.
• Track record of leading through ambiguity, owning missed commitments directly and recovering from production incidents.
• Excellent written and verbal communication: concise status updates, focused meetings and executive-ready tradeoff presentations.
• Direct, humble and honest: you disagree clearly, commit fully 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: retail, payments, POS or other transaction-critical systems experience.
• 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 vertical chain of VP, Senior Director, Director, engineering manager and engineers is accountable for outcomes. There is no PMO setting schedules, so accountability follows control.

Horizontal teams support rather than own delivery. Technical Program Managers, Quality, DevOps and Principal Engineers coordinate, automate, architect and remove blockers, but you own the end-to-end plan.

AI reduces overhead, not accountability. The company invests in agentic tooling for status, risk detection, test generation and reporting to lower the coordination load on engineers and managers.

You will drive the plan, flag the risks and ship the product, rather than passing status to a project manager or waiting for a Technical Program Manager to define the work.

The company is a billion-dollar global firm headquartered in Research Triangle Park, NC, supplying in-store retail solutions and holding the world's largest installed market share.

Base salary range is $130,000 to $200,000 per year. The final offer depends on scope, experience, education, training, work location, and market and business factors.

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

Equal opportunity employer.

Benefits

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