Software Development Manager

Job description

Role Purpose Lead a team responsible for building and running one or more of our key SaaS products. You are responsible for appropriate organization structure made up of Individual Contributor Developers, Team Leads and Tech Leads. Your working product team will be made up of members you line manage directly, as well as members from other teams managed elsewhere. You are expected to build strong working relationships and practices with members from Product, Quality Assurance, Design and DevOps. Principal Accountabilities and Key Activities Lead complex, strategic engineering initiatives, working across globally distributed engineering, product, operations and senior leadership teams. Own end-to-end delivery of the team's projects — properly resourced, on schedule and within budget — managing cross-team dependencies, risks and trade-offs. Hire, develop, upskill, mentor and retain a high-performing team of engineers and architects, and manage performance. Drive adoption and governance of the agentic AI–enabled SDLC across teams, and evidence its impact on delivery. Partner with Product and customer-facing teams to shape and prioritise product vision and roadmap. Own the engineering quality, performance, security and compliance bar, ensuring the reliability, performance and responsiveness of product applications. Ensure the team designs and delivers scalable, cloud-native, multi-tenant architecture, and contribute to estimation, system architecture and performance engineering. Ensure robust release management across QA/UAT and production, with a healthy, repeatable release process and supporting documentation. Report progress, challenges and risks to stakeholders at regular intervals. Education, Qualifications and Experience (Include skills and competencies required to perform the role competently) Essential Desirable 10+ years in software engineering, including proven experience leading and line-managing engineering teams Track record of building, hiring and retaining high-performing teams, and of holding a team accountable for reliable, effective delivery Proven ability to design and roll out an agentic AI–enabled software development lifecycle Deep expertise architecting and delivering cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS for enterprise customers, designing for scalability, availability and extensibility Strong grounding in distributed systems and service-oriented / microservices architecture Hands-on experience establishing CI/CD and modern delivery practice using industry-standard tooling Working knowledge across the majority of the stack: C#, TypeScript, SQL, React, microservices, message queues, Docker/Kubernetes and Azure Background in Apparel Industry Experience with combinational optimization through solvers like CP-SAT or cuOPT Experience shipping AI or ML features into a product Familiarity with modern delivery practice — trunk-based development, DORA-style metrics, and a security-first SDLC