Sr. Technical Manager

Major Responsibilities

• Lead a self-managed team delivering a greenfield platform for WorldCat Entities and related linked data applications
• Partner closely with Product and stakeholders to define outcomes, milestones, and delivery plans
• Drive architecture and technical direction for high-scale services supporting entity creation, enrichment, reconciliation, and search/discovery use cases
• Contribute hands-on through design docs, technical spikes, PRs, code reviews, pairing, and occasionally owning end-to-end features
• Ensure production readiness: SLAs, monitoring/alerting, incident response, disaster recovery practices, and operational documentation for 24/7 services
• Lead modern API and service design (REST and event-driven patterns where appropriate), with attention to performance, accessibility, and backward compatibility
• Establish and evolve engineering practices: CI/CD, automated testing, secure-by-default development, release hygiene, and dependency/vulnerability management
• Coach and develop engineers via feedback, mentoring, and growth plans; foster strong team norms around ownership, code quality, and pragmatic decision-making
• Cook up cross-team technical work (platform, security, infrastructure, and partner teams) and communicate tradeoffs, risks, and progress to senior leadership

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
• 7+ years of professional software development experience, including 3+ years in a technical leadership role (engineering manager, tech lead, or player-coach)
• Strong coding ability and system design depth; demonstrated experience building and operating distributed services in production
• Experience with Java/Spring Boot services and modern cloud-native deployment patterns (containers, microservices)
• Strong knowledge of AWS and container orchestration (EKS/ECS), plus production operations (observability, on-call readiness, incident management)
• Experience with search technologies (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch) and relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL/Aurora/RDS), including performance tuning and migration/upgrade planning
• Familiarity with API gateways/service routing and designing stable, consumer-friendly APIs
• Strong understanding of CI/CD and automated testing strategies in an iterative delivery environment
• Excellent communication skills: able to explain architecture, risks, and tradeoffs to engineers, product partners, and senior stakeholders
• Experience with Agile delivery and leading teams through iterative planning and execution

Desired Qualifications

• Experience with knowledge graph implementations and graph technologies, such as designing/operating graph-based data models and services using RDF triple stores and/or property graph databases (e.g., Neptune, Blazegraph, GraphDB, Neo4j), including query languages (SPARQL/Gremlin/Cypher) and graph indexing/performance considerations
• Experience with linked data / semantic web concepts (RDF, BIBFRAME, authority data, entity resolution) or adjacent data-centric domains
• Experience designing data ingestion/enrichment pipelines and automation for recurring refreshes
• Familiarity with accessibility considerations for web applications and platform UI integrations
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or equivalent)