Engineering Manager
Cayuse · Chicago, IL · 3 mo ago
RemoteRemoteEngineeringFull-time
Team Leadership
- Build and develop strong engineering and QA teams through hiring, onboarding, and ongoing career development.
- Establish employee performance goals, provide regular feedback, and conduct formal performance evaluations.
- Hold regular 1:1s with direct reports; provide real-time coaching and mentorship.
- Handle HR matters and support resource/staffing planning across teams and functions.
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, continuous improvement, and psychological safety.
- Develop communication skills across the team.
Software Development & Technical Execution
- Own the SDLC — enforce and uphold architectural and engineering best practices throughout design and execution.
- Partner with Product and Technical Leads on planning and ensuring high-quality technical delivery of features each sprint.
- Provide guidance on architecture and solution designs aligned to the target architecture.
- Remove both technical and non-technical impediments that slow the team down.
- Work with the team to uphold the Definition of Done (DoD), including unit testing and test automation coverage.
- Support incident response and change management processes; may lead incident response when needed.
- Drive project success criteria — quality attributes, release frequency, security compliance, defects.
Roadmap & Strategic Planning
- Develop a technical roadmap in collaboration with the Product and Technical Leads to support product vision and improve the technical foundation.
- Contribute to the long-term technical strategy in collaboration with engineering leadership.
- Work with Technical Lead and Architecture team to identify and prioritize technical investments each quarter.
- Partner with Client Delivery and Modernization leads to enable efficient, effective delivery.
Agile Leadership
- Coach and support the Technical Lead in running effective Agile ceremonies — standups, sprint planning, refinement, reviews, and retrospectives.
- Career planning and development of the team.
- Coordinate technical dependencies across teams for integration, testing, and deployments.
- Monitor sprint and PI goal progress; coach the team on continuous improvements and growth opportunities.
- Ensure capacity planning and work type allocation ratios are tracked and balanced (features, support, tech debt).
Operational Excellence
- Communicate material estimate changes to senior engineering leadership and delivery leads.
- Maintain work status within project management tools.
- Create documentation for tools and processes owned by the Engineering team.
- Identify risks, dependencies, and process gaps; raise and manage Jira tickets to address them.
- Support operational standards including runbooks, deployment checklists, incident management, and out-of-office procedures.
Tech Debt & Quality
- Lead the identification and prioritization of tech debt across products, in collaboration with Tech Leads, Product Managers, and QA.
- Drive resolution of tech debt with a focus on: Sev1 root causes, critical/high security issues, outdated technology, and high-volume customer support issues.
- Support and encourage increasing automated QA coverage as a core team metric.
AI & Continuous Learning
- Champion the use of AI tools (Claude, Copilot, PlayerZero, etc.) in day-to-day engineering workflows.
- Ensure team members dedicate regular time to training in accessibility, Agile, AI, security, and unit testing.
- Help establish and track AI usage baselines as part of team metrics.
Qualifications
- 3+ years of experience of leading and developing teams.
- 8+ years of experience designing, building and shipping full stack applications; comfortable engaging across the UI, API and data layers.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD Pipelines, Object Oriented design, automated testing.
- Experience maintaining production systems, including application performance monitoring, security remediation.
- B.S. or equivalent in Computer Science or equivalent skills and knowledge.
- Demonstrated ability to drive technical execution and software delivery in an Agile/iterative environment.
- Working knowledge of Agile practices: user story decomposition, estimation, sprint planning, Kanban.
- Employee management skills: coaching, performance assessment, delegation and communication.
- Ability to make mature, objective technical decisions grounded in principles and data.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to communicate across technical and business audiences.
Benefits
- Competitive Medical Benefits (PPO + HSA available)
- Vision, Dental, Short-Term Disability fully covered by Cayuse
- Unlimited PTO + Holidays + Flexible Work Schedule
- Remote Work Stipend
- Equal Paid Parental Leave
- 401k with Employer Matching
- Quarterly Wellness Reimbursement
- Remote Work Environment, supporting the Ultimate Employee Experience