Engineering Team Manager

Engineering Team Manager

Platform & Microservices

Position Overview:

Anaqua is looking for a dynamic Engineering Team Manager to lead our Platform & Microservices team spanning development, QA automation, and DevOps. This is a hands-on leadership role - you write code, review architecture, and make technical decisions while managing people and delivery.

You will play a dual role: Product Owner for the platform services (owning the backlog, priorities, and roadmap) and technical team lead who drives Agile execution, engineering excellence, and team growth. You lead by example - your team sees you in the code, in the design discussions, and at the whiteboard.

You'll love this job if you like to:

TEAM & DELIVERY LEADERSHIP

• Team Management - lead a cross-functional Agile team of developers, QA automation engineers, and DevOps engineers.
• Agile Execution - drive sprint planning, daily stand-ups, backlog refinement, retrospectives, and release coordination.
• Delivery Ownership - own delivery commitments - sprint goals, release timelines, and production readiness.
• People Development - build a high-performing team through hiring, onboarding, mentoring, performance reviews, and career development.
• Stakeholder Management - remove blockers, manage dependencies across teams, and escalate risks proactively.
• Team Culture - foster a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence.

PRODUCT OWNERSHIP - PLATFORM SERVICES

• Backlog Management - own the product backlog for platform services - prioritizes features, tech debt, and operational improvements.
• Roadmap & Strategy - collaborate with business, product management, and architecture to define roadmap and quarterly goals.
• Requirements - write clear user stories with acceptance criteria; ensure the team understands the "why" behind every deliverable.
• Prioritization - make trade-off decisions between scope, quality, and timelines with a customer-centric lens.
• Cross-Team Alignment - represent the platform in cross-team planning, dependency discussions, and release coordination.

HANDS-ON TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP

• Lead by Example - actively participate in code reviews, architecture discussions, and design decisions.
• Backend & Cloud - hands-on development experience with Java microservices, APIs (REST, gRPC), and cloud-native patterns on GCP.
• DevOps Fluency - strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and infrastructure automation.
• QA Understanding - familiarity with test automation strategy - E2E (Playwright), API testing, contract testing, and quality gates in pipelines.
• Technical Decision-Making - ability to evaluate technical trade-offs, guide technology choices, and drive architectural standards.
• Production Ownership - experience with observability, production debugging, incident management, and post-mortem processes.

ENGINEERING PRACTICES & STANDARDS

• Establish and enforce coding standards, review processes, and engineering guidelines across development, QA, and DevOps.
• Champion shift-left quality - automated testing, static analysis, security scanning integrated into the development workflow.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) to improve team productivity.
• define and track engineering metrics - deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR.
• Ensure secure coding practices and compliance with organizational security policies.

AGILE & SDLC MASTERY

• deep practical experience running Scrum or Kanban teams in a continuous delivery environment.
• strong command of the Agile work item hierarchy - Epics, Features, User Stories, Tasks, Bugs.
• Jira mastery - board configuration, sprint metrics, velocity tracking, release planning, and reporting.
• full SDLC ownership - from requirements through development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.
• clear understanding of environments and promotion workflows - Dev, QA, Staging, Pre-Production, Production.

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS & MINDSET

• Proven track record of delivering complex technical projects on time and at quality.
• Dynamic and adaptable - comfortable switching between strategic planning and hands-on problem solving.
• Excellent communicator - translates business needs to technical teams and technical complexity to business stakeholders.
• Customer-centric - every decision is evaluated through the lens of end-user impact.
• Proactive and innovative - brings ideas to improve product, process, tools, and team capabilities.
• Resilient under pressure - maintains clarity and calm during production incidents and tight deadlines.

What you'll need to be successful:

• 10+ years of relevant industry experience required.
• Certified Scrum Master (CSM) or Certified Product Owner (CSPO).
• Experience managing distributed or remote teams.
• ReactJS frontend knowledge for full-stack architectural context.
• Python for scripting and automation.
• Cloud cost optimization and FinOps awareness.
• Background in brand protection, IP enforcement, or digital investigation domains.
• Experience in enterprise SaaS domains.