Software Engineering Manager

Description

The company is a Canadian digital automotive business with several products. Its marketplace is Canada's largest for vehicles, drawing over 25 million visits a month.

Its software serves more than 3,500 dealers with tools for operations, marketing and sales, and its financing portal handles over 6.5 million credit applications a year.

Its collateral management system supports lenders nationally with lien and registration, recovery and insolvency work.

The company belongs to AutoScout24, the parent group that runs Europe's largest online car marketplace, and is building its presence in Canada and beyond.

You will join the Activix CRM team as Engineering Manager, leading the full-stack engineers who build the CRM platform and its related services.

Responsibilities

• Get work across the finish line. Turn vague goals into concrete next steps, assign clear owners, clear blockers and follow each action to the end.
• When a commitment is at risk, raise it early with options, a recommendation and a clear statement of what support or decision you need.
• Coach and grow engineers. Set expectations, give regular feedback, support career growth and handle performance issues early and fairly. Help hire and onboard people and build a team where concerns, challenges and mistakes are open to discussion.
• Run delivery with Product, UX, Data and adjacent teams. Help define outcomes, scope, priorities and acceptance criteria. Facilitate useful Scrum ceremonies, plan capacity and milestones, track progress, manage dependencies and risks, and report status and forecasts. Agree early on any change to scope or timing, and review customer results and production performance after each release.
• Keep the workload sustainable. Match work in progress to engineering and review capacity, complexity and production support. Use retrospectives to fix repeated delivery problems, and protect time for technical improvement, mentoring and learning.
• Stay technically credible. Understand the application architecture, code, integrations and infrastructure well enough to guide engineers and question assumptions. Join design and code reviews, dig into hard issues, and step in hands-on when needed. Weigh speed against maintainability, performance and security.
• Investigate problems with curiosity. Test assumptions on technical and delivery issues, explore workable alternatives, and bring options with trade-offs and a recommendation. Turn what the team learns into practical changes.
• Own engineering and operational health. Set clear service ownership and standards for testing, observability, accessibility, security, privacy and release readiness. Define useful service-level objectives, support incident response, and turn incident lessons and technical debt reviews into prioritized work.
• Lead practical AI adoption. Help engineers use AI tools and agents for discovery, implementation, testing, review and documentation. Set context, constraints and acceptance criteria, and decide where automation, human review or escalation fits. Require validation, independent engineering review, and people making the final call on merges and releases.
• Improve how the team works. Use customer outcomes, delivery flow, quality, reliability and team health to decide what to change. Judge AI workflows by their effect on quality, rework and sustainable delivery, share reusable guidance, and support people as tools and responsibilities change.

Requirements

• At least five years of engineering leadership, including developing people, building effective teams and delivering software products. Experience with hiring, coaching, career development and direct but constructive performance management.
• A record of moving hard work forward: clearing blockers, making decisions within your authority, coordinating others and finishing agreed actions. You raise concerns early with proposed fixes, own your commitments, and communicate clearly when plans change.
• A strong software engineering background and experience building and running scalable, public-facing web applications. You can explain architecture and code-level trade-offs, guide engineers through reviews, and troubleshoot across applications, integrations and cloud infrastructure.
• Practical experience combining Scrum Master duties with project management: planning, capacity assessment, milestone tracking, dependency and risk management, delivery reporting and stakeholder communication. You have helped a team get back on track when plans shifted and can link engineering work to customer results.
• Examples of investigating unfamiliar problems, considering creative options and recommending a workable path. You can describe the options you weighed, the trade-offs you accepted and what happened after you acted.
• Experience with AI-assisted engineering workflows and helping others adopt them well. You can explain how you check output, manage risk, and decide whether a workflow improves delivery and quality.
• Clear communication, empathetic coaching, and the ability to build trust, handle difficult conversations and create accountability across different views and working styles.
• Hands-on depth in the core web stack and enough breadth to guide the team across the Activix core, integration services and mobile apps.
• PHP and Laravel: hands-on work building and troubleshooting Laravel applications and services, including API design, authentication, background jobs and maintainable architecture.
• JavaScript, TypeScript and Vue: experience with Vue web applications, with enough frontend skill to guide component design, state management, testing and the Vite build toolchain.
• Data and integrations: practical use of PostgreSQL or a comparable relational database, Redis caching and queues, APIs and event-driven integrations. You can reason about data integrity, retries, failures and system boundaries.
• React Native and React: working knowledge of mobile delivery on iOS and Android, API integration, authentication and push notifications, with enough depth to guide design, review and troubleshooting with mobile engineers.
• AWS and delivery: experience guiding cloud deployments and CI/CD, with working knowledge of Docker, ECS, Lambda, SQS, SNS and GitHub Actions across container-based and serverless services.
• Quality and operations: working knowledge of automated testing, search indexing, identity and observability. You can guide the team in using PHPUnit, Vitest, Playwright, Jest, Appium, Auth0 and Sentry.
• Informed judgment on design, review and operations is what this role calls for. Deep specialist expertise in every supporting tool is not required.

Conditions

AutoSync builds software that helps dealerships run operations, improve marketing and sell more vehicles. This role leads the full-stack engineering team for the Activix CRM platform and related services.

You will lead with ownership, turning priorities into action, removing blockers and following work until it delivers the result it was meant to. Working closely with Product and other partners, you will give engineers clear direction and real ownership so they can build reliable software that solves customer problems.

You will combine people leadership, hands-on technical depth and solid delivery management, guiding engineers through design, review and troubleshooting while building a team that makes sound decisions and works independently.

The base salary range for this position is $140,000 to $150,000 CAD. The posted range reflects expected pay at the time of posting. The final offer may vary and may be higher depending on skills, experience, location and market conditions. The total rewards package may also include benefits, a bonus and other employee offerings.

The company uses artificial intelligence in its hiring process, including to screen, assess or select applicants for this role.

This posting is for an existing vacancy.

Benefits

• You will help shape a platform used by dealerships and the car buyers they serve.
• You will have direct influence over how the team grows, how engineering decisions get made and how AI is used to improve the work.
• You will help build a team that owns its services and understands the customer impact of what it ships.