Senior Engineering Manager

Paylocity is an award-winning provider of cloud-based HR and payroll software solutions, offering the most complete platform for the modern workforce. The company helps businesses automate and streamline HR and payroll processes, attract and retain talent, and build a strong workplace culture. Paylocity develops tools that go beyond basic HR automation to meet the expectations of the modern workforce.

About The Role

At Paylocity, Senior Software Engineering Managers are technology-focused leaders who act as the bridge between engineering teams and business strategies. This role oversees multiple engineering teams in the Payroll domain, enabling them to achieve high performance, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. The position requires a commitment to exceptional results, continuous improvement, and building a collaborative culture in a remote-first environment.

Responsibilities

• Act as a direct servant leader for 4 teams and 2 principal engineers.
• Support and influence team strategies through continuous collaboration with teams and leadership.
• Delve into highly complex Payroll domain systems to guide teams toward success.
• Own the overall health and engineering quality of multiple products while scaling and improving systems.
• Maintain an understanding of business direction and its impact on strategy.
• Break down complex projects, services, and processes for technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Form actionable plans to modernize legacy applications.
• Coordinate cross-functional development efforts with other leaders.
• Speak confidently about project timelines, system architectures, engineering practices, and quality.
• Raise risks immediately and propose directional solutions to mitigate them.
• Guide teams in creating properly leveled estimates to set realistic expectations.
• Establish routines and frameworks for efficient communication and decision-making.
• Keep teams informed of broader organizational initiatives and help integrate them.
• Negotiate delivery tradeoffs with Product partners to manage tech debt and maintenance.
• Help managers grow their skills and experience.
• Actively seek and hire globally distributed talent.
• Conduct managerial interviews and develop interview loops for roles.
• Contribute to psychological safety on teams.
• Hold regular 1:1s with direct reports and occasional skip-levels.
• Provide regular, clear feedback on performance.
• Foster technical decision-making while making final decisions when necessary.
• Lead teams during operational incidents, root cause analysis, and postmortems.
• Create growth opportunities, recognize achievements publicly, and reward high performance.
• Hold self, managers, and teams accountable for delivering high-quality, secure, reusable, and scalable software.
• Build and maintain healthy relationships with product counterparts in the domain.

Requirements

• BS degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Technology, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering.
• 4+ years in a management role overseeing multiple teams.
• Experience leveraging observability and monitoring tools such as DataDog and PagerDuty.
• Experience leading and scaling high-performing engineering teams in a SaaS or enterprise software environment.
• Demonstrable success in strategy development with proven outcomes.
• Collaborative project planning capabilities that factor in risk/reward tradeoffs, assumptions, and confidence levels.
• Exceptional communication skills with a friendly and collaborative demeanor.
• History of direct and indirect influence using data-driven approaches.
• Basic understanding of enterprise financial planning and management tools.
• Familiarity with cloud technologies (preferably AWS).
• Good understanding of architectural patterns like SOA and Microservices, including their advantages and trade-offs.
• Highly experienced in designing and developing large-scale .NET/SQL platforms with heavy emphasis on asynchronous processing and modern APIs in a React-based ecosystem.
• Passion for the role and responsibility for team deliverables.
• Able to work effectively in a team environment in an agile fashion.
• Practical and creative problem-solving skills.
• Fluent in frontier AI tools supporting an AI-enhanced SDLC (Anthropic, OpenAI, or Copilot).
• Comfortable leading highly critical products of immense scale with zero margin for error.
• Able to break down ambiguity, understand the domain, and drive teams to deliver customer outcomes.
• Supportive mentor and coach for engineering managers and individual contributors.
• Able to independently initiate, plan, and execute high-quality projects at business-required velocity.
• Skilled at building and presenting features, execution plans, and reporting progress to senior leadership.
• Willingness to share ideas in a collaborative environment with an open mind.
• Receptive to constructive feedback and unafraid to seek suggestions from other organizational categories.

Physical Requirements

• Ability to sit for extended periods (7-8 hours per day).
• Use of computer and phone systems, including typing and multitasking across software programs.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Life and disability insurance.
• 401(k) match.
• Perks supporting employees, families, and finances.
• Career development opportunities.

Pay

The base pay range for this position is $167,000 - $215,000 per year. Base pay may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This position is also eligible for an annual bonus and restricted stock unit grant based on individual performance, in addition to a full range of benefits.

Schedule

This is a fully remote position, allowing you to work from home or your location of record within the U.S. You must be available five days per week during designated work hours. The work arrangement is subject to change based on business needs and individual performance, which may include adjustments to on-site requirements or schedule expectations.