About the Role
ProductSquads is looking for a Manager / Senior Manager, Engineering who can lead engineering teams in an AI-native software development environment while driving technical excellence, product-focused delivery, people growth, and accountability.
This is a hands-on leadership role, not a pure people management or delivery coordination role. We are looking for someone who can stay close to architecture, technical decisions, code quality, AI-assisted engineering workflows, delivery execution, and team development. The ideal candidate is a strong engineering and people leader who can guide teams using modern software engineering practices, AI coding assistants, and coding agents while ensuring that speed does not compromise quality, security, maintainability, or product outcomes. This person should be able to lead engineers, grow careers, build accountability, mentor future leaders, and represent ProductSquads with strong technical credibility in front of clients and internal stakeholders.
Responsibilities
- Hands-on Engineering Leadership
- Lead one or more engineering teams across product development, client delivery, or platform initiatives.
- Own technical execution, architecture alignment, delivery planning, code quality, and release readiness.
- Participate in architecture reviews, solution design, technical planning, code reviews, and complex implementation discussions.
- Guide teams in building scalable, secure, reliable, maintainable, and testable software.
- Help resolve complex technical issues across application code, APIs, integrations, databases, cloud, DevOps, performance, and production environments.
- Establish and improve engineering practices such as clean code, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, documentation, security reviews, and technical debt management.
- Ensure that engineering teams make pragmatic technical decisions aligned with business and product goals.
- AI-Native Engineering & Coding Agent Adoption
- Lead teams that actively use AI coding agents such as Claude Code or Codex.
- Help teams break down work into clear, AI-ready specifications, prompts, tasks, acceptance criteria, and review checklists.
- Create guardrails for responsible AI usage, including privacy, security, code ownership, validation, and human review.
- Ensure AI improves engineering productivity and quality without weakening engineer ownership, judgment, or learning.
- Product Mindset & Delivery Ownership
- Understand the business goals, customer needs, and product outcomes behind every engineering initiative.
- Partner with product managers, business analysts, UX teams, QA, architects, delivery managers, and client stakeholders.
- Translate business requirements into clear engineering plans, milestones, technical designs, and delivery outcomes.
- Challenge unclear requirements and propose better product or technical alternatives when needed.
- Balance delivery speed, user value, technical quality, security, scalability, maintainability, and technical debt.
- Encourage engineers to think beyond assigned tasks and contribute to better product outcomes.
- Own delivery predictability, risk management, dependency management, and transparent communication.
- People Leadership, Career Growth & Accountability
- Manage, mentor, and grow engineers across different experience levels.
- Conduct regular one-on-ones, feedback conversations, career development discussions, and performance reviews.
- Help engineers build stronger technical skills, product thinking, AI proficiency, ownership, communication, and leadership capability.
- Set clear expectations around quality, accountability, communication, collaboration, and delivery commitments.
- Hold team members accountable for outcomes, not just effort or activity.
- Identify performance gaps early and address them through coaching, support, clear goals, and structured improvement plans.
- Recognize high performers and create growth paths for future technical leads, architects, managers, and senior individual contributors.
- Build a culture of ownership, learning, engineering discipline, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
- Create succession plans and develop second-line technical leaders within the team.
- Client & Stakeholder Management
- Work closely with ProductSquads leadership, delivery teams, product owners, and client stakeholders.
- Communicate engineering progress, technical decisions, risks, dependencies, trade-offs, and delivery status clearly.
- Participate in client calls, technical discovery, estimation, solution walkthroughs, architecture reviews, and delivery reviews.
- Represent ProductSquads with strong technical credibility, ownership, and professionalism.
- Help clients understand technical options, risks, delivery implications, and AI-enabled engineering opportunities
Qualifications
- 6+ years of software engineering experience.
- 3+ years of experience leading engineering teams as a Technical Lead, Engineering Manager, Senior Engineering Manager, or similar role.
- Strong hands-on background in software development, architecture, debugging, code quality, and delivery execution.
- Experience managing and mentoring engineers while remaining technically involved.
- Experience delivering web, enterprise, SaaS, cloud, workflow, integration, data, or product-based applications.
- Experience working in Agile/Scrum delivery environments.
- Experience in client-facing technology delivery is strongly preferred.
Required Skills
- Software architecture and system design.
- Clean code, design patterns, and engineering best practices.
- APIs, microservices, integrations, and enterprise application development.
- Relational and/or NoSQL databases.
- Cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP.
- CI/CD, DevOps, automated testing, observability, performance, and security.
- Code review, technical documentation, and release readiness.
- Technical debt identification and remediation.
- Hands-on or strong past hands-on experience in one or more of the following is expected:
- Python, React / TypeScript, Node.js, SQL / NoSQL databases, REST APIs / microservices, Azure / AWS / GCP, CI/CD and
