Sr Manager Development

What you’ll get to do

Technical leadership:

• Maintain strong hands-on technical depth in backend engineering, cloud-native architectures, microservices, distributed systems, and API design.
• Provide architectural guidance across multiple teams, ensuring scalability, performance, resilience, and secure design.
• Lead technical reviews, ensuring design cohesion across services and alignment with Dayforce platform standards.
• Evaluate and challenge technical proposals, ensuring solutions meet enterprise-ready requirements.
• Mentor leads, senior developers, and principal engineers on system design, performance engineering, data modeling and test strategies.
• Partner with architects to define cross-team technical strategy and long-term architectural roadmaps.
• Ensure backend systems follow best practices in caching, partitioning, event-driven design, fault tolerance, testability, and cloud-native deployment.
• Prioritize and drive reduction of technical debt and platform improvements that enhance stability, developer productivity, and long-term maintainability.
• Partner with Security and Architecture to ensure secure coding practices, threat modeling, and architectural governance are consistently applied.
• Encourage adoption of AI-assisted development, modern tooling, automation, DevOps practices, and operational excellence.
• Drive end-to-end product quality by ensuring engineering decisions consistently support functional accuracy, usability, maintainability, and customer experience, partnering closely with Product Management to align quality expectations across the roadmap.

Execution:

• Oversee execution of large-scale, cross-team engineering initiatives with high technical complexity.
• Collaborate proactively with cross-functional partners across Product, UX, Architecture, Security, QA, Customer Support, and Program Management to ensure alignment, remove blockers, and drive successful end-to-end delivery.
• Act as the connective link between engineering and other departments, ensuring shared context, strong partnerships, and consistent execution across organizational boundaries.
• Drive roadmap delivery in partnership with Product, ensuring teams deliver predictably against commitments.
• Manage interdependencies between services, identifying and resolving risks early.
• Ensure teams consistently meet engineering SLAs for reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Make prioritization decisions that balance product value, technical risk, and long-term platform health.
• Standardize development practices, branching strategies, testing frameworks, and work-tracking tools to drive predictability through strong planning, estimation, and agile execution practices.
• Partner with Product, UX, Architecture, and Program Management to ensure smooth cross-functional execution.

Quality and operational excellence:

• Oversee quality metrics and embed them into team planning and retrospectives.
• Ensure teams consistently maintain comprehensive automated testing (unit, integration, performance) aligned with expectations of Senior/Principal roles.
• Own systemic issue escalations and guide teams through root-cause analysis, corrective action, and long-term remediation.
• Promote robust observability (logging, monitoring, alerting), operational readiness, and incident response best practices.
• Define and support on-call rotations, incident response processes, and reliability KPIs such as MTTR and incident frequency.

People leadership:

• Manage Engineering Leads and multiple development teams, building a high-performing technical culture.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for the engineering teams, ensuring clear communication, timely escalations, and effective representation of team needs, priorities, and challenges across the organization.
• Own the hiring plan, interview calibration, and partnership with Talent Acquisition to ensure timely, high-quality hiring.
• Provide coaching on performance, technical leadership, and engineering decision-making.
• Build leadership pipelines by developing future managers and senior technical leaders.
• Create an environment of continuous learning, and open feedback. Proactively address team health issues and reinforce the importance of hybrid/in-person collaboration.
• Ensure onboarding programs include high-quality technical ramp-up across products.
• Model effective cross-regional collaboration between India, North America, and Europe.
• Resolve technical and organizational conflicts constructively, ensuring teams stay aligned and unblock quickly.
• Drive performance calibration, promotion readiness, and career development for engineers and technical leaders.

Skills and experience we value

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 10+ Years of Strong hands-on engineering background, including: C#, .NET, Java, or equivalent backend languages. Microservices, event-driven architecture, REST/gRPC APIs, Cloud-native services on Azure/AWS, Kubernetes, SQL/NoSQL databases, caching, distributed messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ), CI/CD pipelines, DevOps automation, observability and incident response.
• Proven experience managing multiple engineering teams and leading technical delivery at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to coach senior engineers and influence architecture across teams.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to bridge technical and business discussions.
• Experience leading distributed engineering teams across regions (India and North America preferred).
• Experience delivering large, complex, multi-team initiatives.
• Experience in designing or operating large-scale enterprise SaaS platforms.
• Proven ability to hire, onboard, and develop engineering talent and future leaders.
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders across Product, Architecture, and Program Management.