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Title: Software Engineering Manager Delivery
Cognizant is one of the world's leading professional services companies, transforming clients business, operating, and technology models for the digital era. Our unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses. Headquartered in the United States, Cognizant (a member of the NASDAQ-100 and one of
Forbes World's Best Employers 2025) is consistently listed among the most admired companies in the world.
This role is part of
Cognizant IOA (Intelligent Operations and Automation), the division leading the transformation from traditional business process outsourcing to AI-powered operations. We started as Matterway, a German startup, and while we're now part of Cognizant, we operate the way we always have: small team, fast decisions, real ownership. We combine human expertise with intelligent automation, ML operations, and digital experience solutions to help technology and digital-native companies build smarter, more adaptive operating models.
What is the opportunity
We are looking for a
Software Engineering Manager to join our fast-growing Delivery Team. You will lead a team of engineers who design, build, and deliver high-quality automation agents and software solutions for our customers. This role blends people leadership, engineering operational excellence, customer delivery oversight, and cross-functional alignment.
You will be responsible for hiring and developing engineering talent, improving software development lifecycle practices, guiding delivery quality, supporting customer engagements, ensuring security and compliance, and collaborating across teams to support strategic growth.
This is the right role for someone who is still close to the code, understands what makes engineers productive, and knows how to keep customer delivery running smoothly without turning it into a bureaucratic exercise. You care about outcomes, not process for its own sake.
What will you be doing
Your Day-to-day Responsibilities
People Management and Team Development
- Hire, onboard, coach, and retain engineers
- Run one-to-ones, performance reviews, and career development plans
- Monitor team morale, engagement, and workload balance
Engineering Operations
- Implement and improve software delivery practices
- Monitor SDLC performance metrics such as cycle time and DORA indicators
- Enforce code quality, testing, and definition of done standards
- Sponsor infrastructure improvements and technical debt reduction
- Lead or contribute to build-vs-buy, vendor, and tooling decisions
- Represent technical feasibility early during ideation with product managers
- Manage engineering vendors including billing, seat allocation, and licensing
- When needed, contribute as an individual: reviewing code, writing code, or performing acceptance testing
Customer Delivery Operations
- Ensure delivery standards are met including timesheets, retrospectives, and required rituals
- Support the Head of Delivery with capacity planning, allocation, and prioritization, balancing technical debt with delivery commitments
- Act as the technical escalation point when delivery is slow or blocked
- Validate technical feasibility such as assessing external APIs
Governance, Risk, and Compliance
- Define and maintain the security incident playbook including severity levels, escalation processes, and communication flows
- Define and socialize a secure SDLC policy covering coding guidelines, branch protections, and review gates
- Embed security training into onboarding and ongoing refreshers
- Ensure vulnerabilities are addressed within established SLAs
- Ensure teams follow company policies regarding intellectual property and access control
- Manage open source license usage and maintain the software bill of materials
Cross-Functional Alignment and Strategic Leadership
- Participate in Delivery budget reviews
- Assess and propose adjustments to delivery capacity
You Will Know You Are Successful If
- You build and retain a strong, engaged engineering team with healthy morale
- Delivery is predictable: customers know what to expect and expectations are met
- You improve speed and quality across delivery workflows without adding unnecessary overhead
- You enforce security, compliance, and engineering excellence consistently
- Customers and stakeholders see you as a reliable, technically credible partner
What Makes You a Great Fit
Must-haves
- Technically credible engineering background: you can read the code, spot the problems, and have an opinion
- 3+ years of experience in TypeScript or JavaScript development as an individual contributor
- Proficiency in the TypeScript and JavaScript ecosystem including code review and debugging
- Experience with Node.js and modern tooling such as npm or pnpm, ESLint, Jest or Vitest, and bundlers
- Ability to represent technical constraints and tradeoffs clearly to customers and stakeholders
Delivery and Operations Management
- Experience in professional services, consulting, or customer-facing delivery environments where you owned outcomes, not just tasks
- Experience managing multiple concurrent customer engagements
- Familiarity with delivery metrics such as utilization, cycle time, and capacity planning
- Ability to handle customer escalations and unblock technical challenges
- Experience with resource allocation and skills-based staffing
- A track record of improving delivery processes in ways that actually stuck
People Management
- 1+ year managing engineering teams beyond tech lead responsibilities
- Experience managing teams of 8 or more engineers
- Experience hiring, onboarding, and retaining engineers
- Experience running structured performance reviews and career development conversations
- Ability to manage underperformance when required
- Experience managing distributed and remote teams
Good to have
- Hands-on experience building applications using LLM APIs
- Understanding of prompt engineering concepts such as few-shot prompting and chain of thought
- Familiarity with AI failure modes including hallucinations, context limits, and latency issues
Why join us
- Lead delivery in a team that builds genuinely novel AI-powered products, not generic enterprise software
- Work with a senior, internationally distributed engineering team where your decisions have direct impact
- The resources of a global company with the speed and culture of a startup
- Remote-first set-up, with the option to work from one of our 13 locations in India: Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Noida, Kolkata, Kochi, Coimbatore, Bhubaneswar, Mangalore, and Indore
- Flexible working hours
- Collaborative, pragmatic culture focused on outcomes
- Fast-growing team within Cognizant, with access to global resources and real career opportunities
