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.