Manager, Software Engineering

Description

The company is a billion-dollar global firm based in Research Triangle Park, NC, that supplies retail store solutions. Its retail commerce platform runs point of sale, mobile, self-service and back-of-store operations in tens of thousands of stores worldwide.

You may have used it at a warehouse club's self-checkout, paid at a big-box retailer, or shopped at a global grocery or apparel chain. Customers include Lowe's Foods, Kroger, Walmart, Michaels, Carrefour, The Gap, Calvin Klein, Boots, Cencosud, BJ's and Costco.

The team is extending the platform with AI-native development tools, an agentic platform layer, and an operating model in which engineering runs delivery from start to finish.

The role leads one or more product areas. The level is set by your experience, team size and product complexity, so tech leads moving into their first management role and senior managers of large groups are both welcome to apply.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery, quality and team health for one or more product areas.
• Run execution: the milestone plan, sprint tracking, technical risk and quality. You are accountable for the outcome.
• Lead the team: hire, grow people, manage performance and pay, and have hard conversations early.
• Stay technical enough to add value in design reviews, debug production issues and challenge tradeoffs. Partner with Principal Engineers on standards.
• Know the architecture, the backlog, your customers and how your product performs in the market.
• Own customer escalations in your scope and meet SLAs.

Requirements

• 5-10+ years in software development, including 3-10 years in a leadership or manager role.
• A bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or an equivalent qualification.
• A strong software engineering background and a record of shipping production systems at scale. You can hold a deep technical discussion with senior engineers and Principal-level 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. You have hired, developed, managed performance for, and when needed exited engineers.
• Working knowledge of modern Agile delivery, the SDLC and CI/CD in a continuous-deployment setting.
• Ability to move between architecture and debugging, and between executive reviews and sprint standups, within the same day.
• A record of leading through ambiguity, owning missed commitments openly, and recovering from production incidents.
• Clear written and verbal communication: concise status updates, focused meetings, and executive-ready tradeoff presentations.
• Direct, low-ego and honest. You disagree clearly, commit fully and tell people the truth.
• Highly preferred: experience with AI-assisted development, 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 through the vertical chain of VP, Senior Director, Director, EM and engineers. There is no PMO setting schedules, and accountability follows control.

Technical Program Managers, Quality, DevOps and Principal Engineers coordinate, automate, architect and unblock the work. They support delivery but do not own it.

AI tooling for status, risk detection, test generation and reporting is used to reduce the coordination load on engineers and managers.

You drive the plan, call the risks and ship the product. You do not hand status to a project manager or wait for a Technical Program Manager to define the work.

Location: you must be near or within the Raleigh-Durham area.

No visa sponsorship is offered now or in the future, so you must be able to work in the United States without sponsorship.

Base salary range is $130,000-$200,000 per year as a general guideline. The final salary depends on scope, experience, education, training, work location, and market and business factors.

The company is an equal opportunity employer.

Benefits

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