Technical Manager

Job description

Together we make breakthroughs possible. At OCLC, we build technology with a purpose: to connect libraries and make knowledge accessible worldwide, because we believe that what is known must be shared. Our teams work with complex global datasets, AI and machine learning, hybrid cloud solutions, and other technologies that connect people and organizations to the information they need. We value the power of unique perspectives and experiences to unlock innovation. At OCLC, your ideas matter, whether you have two years of experience or 20. You’ll learn, create, and problem-solve with technologists, product developers, librarians, researchers, marketing pros, and support teams around the world. Why join OCLC? OCLC is consistently recognized as a best place to work by several independent programs. We recognize and reward people and results with a comprehensive Total Rewards package. This means competitive compensation that reflects your unique contributions—performance, experience, and skills—along with exceptional benefits, including best-in-class health coverage, retirement plans with generous company contributions, and a commitment to your overall well-being. We know the best ideas don’t always happen at a desk. Take a walking meeting around our 100-acre campus or enjoy lunch on the patio. We’re committed to your success—both personally and professionally. Hybrid work environment: For many roles, three days a week on-site, with occasional additional days based on business needs. Free use of our on-site fitness center, gym sports, group exercise classes, and game room Onsite catering and cafeteria subsidized by OCLC Health and wellness events Work environments with individual and team spaces and the latest technology tools Paid parental leave and adoption assistance Tuition reimbursement and Public Service Loan Forgiveness eligibility Company-subsidized pricing on local tickets and memberships Join us in transforming how people everywhere access information and be part of a mission-driven team that makes a global impact. The job details are as follows: The Collective Collection Analytics team is looking for a hands-on Technical Manager to guide a growing team of software engineers. This is a player-coach role where roughly 25-40% of your time goes toward designing and building software, with the remainder spent coaching engineers, driving delivery, and ensuring operational excellence. The ideal candidate is a strong coder with deep system design experience, who can lead through influence, set technical direction, and help the team ship reliably in a modern cloud-native environment. Responsibilities: Lead a small cross-functional team of full stack developers (Java backend, React frontend) and cloud engineers, who also cover ETL and data pipeline work, QA automation, and business systems analysis. Serve as the team's functional manager, handling hiring, onboarding, coaching, and performance management through regular one-on-ones and goal setting, along with career development, mentoring, and succession planning. Partner closely with Product Managers on roadmap execution and staffing needs, translating product direction into clear outcomes, milestones, delivery plans, and execution tradeoffs. Drive day-to-day execution, including creating and refining JIRA tickets with the team, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. Own JIRA dashboard management and maintain a multi-sprint-ahead view for the team, prioritizing the backlog based on Product Manager and organizational needs and planning releases accordingly. Provide hands-on technical leadership and contribution through architecture and design work, technical spikes, pull requests, code reviews, pairing, and occasional end-to-end feature ownership. Own and evolve application and integration architecture hosted in AWS, ensuring scalability, security, maintainability, and cost awareness. Establish and enforce engineering standards for API and service design, including REST and event-driven patterns, performance, and backward compatibility. Ensure production readiness and operational excellence, including monitoring, logging, incident response, root cause analysis, runbooks, and disaster recovery documentation. Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and release hygiene practices, working to improve deployment frequency and reduce change failure rate. Define and drive an automated testing strategy across unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, and strengthen QA automation and quality gates. Lead ETL and data integration work across internal and external sources, including custom ETL scripts in Python, with repeatable refresh processes, automation, reconciliation, and data quality controls. Coordinate data platform usage and patterns in AWS, with Snowflake and Google Analytics experience preferred for data modeling, ingestion, reporting, and cost optimization. Implement secure-by-default development practices, including dependency and vulnerability management, secrets management, and least-privilege access patterns. Coordinate cross-team work with security, infrastructure, data, and partner teams, and communicate risks, progress, and tradeoffs to leadership. Drive capacity planning and environment strategy across development, test, stage, and production, ensuring environments support QA and performance testing needs. Evaluate new technologies, tools, and processes, and recommend and implement improvements for reliability, speed, quality, and cost reduction. Drive team-wide adoption of AI-assisted engineering workflows, including coding, testing, documentation, and code review support, within clear guardrails rather than unchecked use. Identify and prioritize AI-enabled automation opportunities, such as data pipeline and reporting automation, anomaly detection, reconciliation, and intelligent alerting, while ensuring responsible usage around security, privacy, intellectual property, and validation of outputs. Create clear metrics and reporting to track delivery, quality, and reliability trends for the team and own the financial budget as assigned. Maintain accountability for time reporting, budgeting inputs, and other administrative responsibilities required for ongoing team support. Required Qualifications: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience. 5+ years of professional software development experience, including 3+ years in a technical leadership role such as engineering manager or tech lead. Strong coding ability and system design depth, with demonstrated experience building and operating distributed services in production. Experience with Java and Spring Boot services, React frontend development with data visualization libraries such as HighCharts, and modern cloud-native deployment patterns such as containers and microservices. Strong knowledge of AWS and container orchestration through EKS or ECS, with production operations experience in observability, on-call readiness, and incident management. Experience with search technologies such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or SOLR, and relational databases such as PostgreSQL, Aurora, or RDS, including performance tuning and upgrade planning. Familiarity with API gateways and service routing, and designing stable, consumer-friendly APIs. Strong understanding of CI/CD and automated testing strategies in an iterative delivery environment. Experience with custom ETL scripting, such as Python, for data integration and pipeline automation. 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: Strong AWS and Snowflake experience. Experience with Google Analytics for reporting and insights. Familiarity with accessibility considerations for web applications and platform UI integrations Working Conditions: Normal office environment. ADA/EAA: The above statements cover what are generally believed to be principal and essential functions of this job. Specific circumstances may allow or require some people assigned to the job to perform a somewhat different combination of duties.