Senior Software Engineering Manager

About the role

The Senior Engineering Manager will lead and scale the Agentic Workflow engineering organization within Pearson Learning Studio (PLS), overseeing a team of 8-16 engineers across multiple Scrum pods in India and Sri Lanka. This role requires a leader who excels at balancing technical excellence with strong people leadership in a globally distributed environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead, manage, and scale a distributed engineering team of 10-20 engineers, including senior engineers and team leads.
• Build a strong leadership bench by mentoring tech leads and emerging managers.
• Drive performance management, including goal setting, regular feedback, and career development plans.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
• Manage hiring, onboarding, and team capacity planning to support business growth.
• Ensure high levels of team engagement, retention, and productivity across geographies.
• Own end-to-end delivery for the Insights & Recommendations domain across multiple Scrum teams.
• Establish predictable execution rhythms, ensuring on-time, high-quality releases.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Analytics to translate strategy into clear engineering roadmaps.
• Identify risks early and proactively remove organizational, technical, or process bottlenecks.
• Drive operational excellence, including metrics, KPIs, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Provide architectural oversight for data-driven applications, analytics pipelines, and web platforms.
• Guide teams on best practices in SQL, data systems, ReactJS, and Java-based services.
• Ensure scalable system design, performance optimization, and reliability.
• Lead technical design reviews and promote sound engineering decisions across teams.
• Balance hands-on involvement (as needed) with effective delegation to senior engineers and tech leads.
• Champion Agile best practices across multiple teams (planning, backlog management, retrospectives).
• Align engineering efforts with business outcomes and customer impact.
• Collaborate with global stakeholders across time zones with strong communication discipline.
• Drive transparency through clear reporting, stakeholder updates, and data-driven decision-making.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing teams of 10+ engineers.
• 12+ years of overall experience in software engineering.
• Proven experience scaling and leading distributed engineering teams across geographies.
• Strong technical background in: SQL & data analytics systems, ReactJS, Java-based backend systems.
• Demonstrated success in delivering data-driven platforms or analytics products.
• Strong experience with Agile/Scrum at scale (multiple teams).
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and organizational leadership skills.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or leading high-performing engineering organizations at scale.
• Experience in education technology and Learning science.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience with data visualization and analytics frameworks.
• Prior experience managing managers or tech leads (second-line leadership).