Manager, Software Engineering

About Us

At Cast & Crew, we’ve empowered creativity and supported the global entertainment industry for decades. Together with our family of brands - Backstage, CAPS, Checks & Balances, Final Draft, Media Services, Sargent-Disc, and The TEAM Companies – we operate as a combined entertainment technology and services provider offering industry standard screenwriting accounting software, digital payroll products, data & reporting, and a host of creative tools. The industry continues to move faster than ever, and the need for our expertise, our technology, and our people has never been greater. We are a production’s best ally every step of the way.

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead and transform a critical product engineering team. The team currently maintains a mature, revenue-generating platform built on legacy Java/Spring, JSP-based front ends, SQL Server stored procedures, and an aging reporting stack.

Responsibilities

• Lead the migration from legacy Java/Spring (non-Boot) to Spring Boot, establishing modular service boundaries, externalized configuration, and modern dependency management.
• Systematically refactor business logic currently embedded in SQL Server stored procedures into well-tested application-layer code, improving testability, portability, and developer comprehension.
• Define and execute the front-end migration from JSP pages to a modern component-based UI stack (React preferred), including API contract design between the new front end and back-end services.
• Upgrade the reporting system from its current legacy platform to a modern reporting solution, coordinating with stakeholders to preserve report fidelity while improving maintainability and performance.
• Establish architectural guardrails (ADRs, tech radar, code-review standards) that keep modernization coherent across the team.
• Triage and prioritize the existing backlog of production defects; create a transparent burn-down plan with clear ownership and SLAs.
• Implement a structured incident-response process: severity definitions, on-call rotation, blameless post-mortems, and follow-through on corrective actions.
• Drive root-cause analysis for recurring production issues and convert findings into permanent fixes rather than repeated band-aids.
• Establish production readiness reviews for all releases to prevent regression and reduce escaped defects.
• Stand up a complete software development lifecycle: version-control workflow (branching strategy, PR reviews), automated build/test pipelines, artifact management, environment promotion, and release management.
• Introduce or mature CI/CD tooling so that every merge triggers automated unit, integration, and smoke tests before reaching production.
• Implement comprehensive monitoring and observability: application metrics, log aggregation, alerting thresholds, dashboards, and distributed tracing where appropriate.
• Define and enforce code-quality gates (static analysis, test coverage minimums, security scanning) in the pipeline.
• Document runbooks, on-call procedures, and operational playbooks so the team can respond to issues without depending on tribal knowledge.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 2 years in a people-management or technical-lead role with direct reports.
• Deep hands-on experience with Java and the Spring ecosystem; direct experience migrating from legacy Spring (XML-config, WAR deployments) to Spring Boot.
• Strong SQL and relational-database skills, with demonstrated experience refactoring stored-procedure-heavy architectures into application-layer logic.
• Production experience with modern front-end frameworks (React strongly preferred; Vue or Angular acceptable) and familiarity with API-first front-end/back-end integration patterns.
• Track record of setting up or significantly improving CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and monitoring/observability stacks.
• Proven ability to manage competing priorities: simultaneous production firefighting and strategic modernization.
• Strong communication skills — comfortable presenting roadmaps and trade-offs to both engineers and senior business stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in payroll, financial services, or other regulated/high-accuracy domains where data correctness is non-negotiable.
• Familiarity with reporting-platform migrations (e.g., Crystal Reports, SSRS, Jasper, Stimulsoft, or similar) and understanding of pixel-perfect document generation requirements.
• Hands-on experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud platforms (AWS or Azure).
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum at a practical level — not ceremony for ceremony’s sake, but effective sprint planning, backlog grooming, and retrospectives.

Benefits

Cast & Crew provides a comprehensive package of employee benefits including: Medical, Dental, Vision, PTO, health and wellness programs, employee discounts, and more!

Pay

$150,000.00 - $180,000.00 per year.

Schedule

Details on schedule not specified.