Sr. Manager, Software Engineering

About the role

As a Senior Engineering Manager on Zoro’s Enterprise Platform Engineering group, you'll provide strategic and tactical leadership to foundational platform services, ensuring technical excellence, reliability, and scalability. You’ll maintain Senior Software Engineer-level technical proficiency and occasionally contribute directly to high-impact engineering tasks, particularly around software quality and testing.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Vision and Technical Leadership:Set and execute strategic technical direction, emphasizing robust, scalable, and thoroughly tested foundational services compliant with industry standards (PCI/SOX/NIST).

• Maintain hands-on technical expertise, contributing strategically to critical engineering tasks and projects.

• Mentor team members in helping to resolve technical challenges and promoting best practices in software quality and testing.

• Ensure predictable, timely, and high-quality delivery of large-scale engineering initiatives through strategic planning, prioritization, and alignment with organizational goals and capacities.

• People Leadership and Team Development:Lead and mentor one or more engineering teams, nurturing a culture of technical excellence, inclusivity, and continuous improvement.

• Provide clear, actionable feedback and growth opportunities, promoting engineering best practices and rigorous testing standards.

• Own and manage platform-related infrastructure costs and third-party tool contracts, ensuring leadership understands the cost/value proposition of various aspects of team spending.

• Drive responsible adoption of AI-assisted engineering workflows within the team, ensuring measurable gains in productivity and quality without compromising code quality, security, compliance, or testing rigor.

• Cross-functional Collaboration:Collaborate closely with Staff Engineering, Product Engineering, and Data Engineering teams to align on technical strategy, execution, and outcomes.

• Facilitate effective communication and decision-making across diverse stakeholders.

• Drive sound technical leadership decisions by communicating technical strategies and project statuses to technology leadership and stakeholders; adapting to the technical-level of a given audience and raising that level where possible through education and explanation.

• Incident Management and Reliability:Oversee proactive monitoring, incident response, and systemic improvements, emphasizing comprehensive testing and reliability engineering.

• Participate in enterprise-wide on-call rotation, leading engineers in addressing critical issues that occur in real-time.

• Drive the root cause analysis process to identify and address problems that cause unexpected incidents. Mentor and assist more junior managers in their RCA’s where necessary.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 4 years in engineering leadership roles.
• Proven ability to drive large-scale foundational engineering initiatives, aligning closely with business objectives and compliance requirements.
• Deep technical expertise with cloud-native infrastructure, distributed systems architecture, Infrastructure as Code, and container orchestration.
• Demonstrated proficiency at a senior software engineering level, directly contributing to complex, strategically critical technical initiatives.
• Experience implementing rigorous testing frameworks and reliability practices across large-scale platform services.
• Exceptional leadership and mentorship skills, with a proven record of developing engineering leaders and fostering high-performing, inclusive teams.
• Strong strategic communication and stakeholder management skills, able to articulate technical vision and translate complex strategies to various audiences, including senior business stakeholders.
• Prominent experience scaling AI-assisted development practices across teams, measuring and communicating business impact of those improvements.

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree (Master’s or equivalent) in a technical field.
• Significant involvement in strategic organizational technology planning, budgeting, and resource allocation decisions.
• Active participation in senior technical leadership communities, demonstrating ongoing contributions and recognized expertise in industry forums.
• Experience influencing cross-organizational AI policy and tooling strategy, balancing innovation with regulatory and operational risk controls.