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.
