Engineering Manager

About Upshop: Upshop is the foremost provider of a SaaS platform designed to streamline forecasting, ordering, production, and inventory optimization processes for food retailers. Its unified platform simplifies and enhances associate tasks, promoting smarter and more interconnected operations across Fresh, Center, DSD, and eCommerce departments. With over 450+ retailers and 50,000+ stores relying on its mission-critical operations platform globally, customers have witnessed substantial enhancements in sales, shrinkage reduction, food safety, and sustainability throughout their stores. At Upshop, we believe that great businesses are built by great people. Our People function is at the heart of our company’s growth, ensuring we attract, develop, and retain A Players who drive our mission forward. Overview of the role: We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead and develop engineering teams responsible for delivering high-quality, scalable software aligned with business goals. This is a permanent, full-time position reporting to the Senior Director of Software Engineering. The Engineering Manager balances people leadership with technical oversight and selective hands-on contribution. This role is accountable for team performance, delivery predictability, engineering standards, and cross-functional collaboration while ensuring strong alignment with Upshop’s business and customer priorities. Responsibilities: - Lead and manage engineering teams as they design, build, test, and deliver high-quality software on schedule, balancing efficiency, cost, and customer satisfaction. - Hire, onboard, train, and develop engineering talent; conduct regular one-on-ones, performance reviews, and team meetings to support career growth and performance objectives. - Set clear team goals and objectives aligned with departmental and company priorities. - Provide leadership, coaching, and motivation to drive accountability, ownership, and consistent execution. - Ensure timely resolution of escalations and partner with the Senior Director of Software Engineering on issues impacting delivery, quality, or timelines. - Design, code, review, and guide development of customer-facing features and backend services using technologies such as C#, React, PHP, and cloud-native services. - Participate in architectural discussions and guide teams on N-Tier architectures, microservices, and cloud-based solutions. - Promote engineering best practices, including clean, maintainable, and defect-free code; enforce standards through source control, pull requests, and code reviews using GitHub and Azure DevOps. - Support testing cycles and post-production deployments to ensure stable, reliable releases. - Ensure new work meets the Definition of Ready prior to sprint commitment; provide estimates and ensure timely assignment of work. - Collaborate closely with Product, QA, Customer Support, and Operations to translate business requirements into functional and technical solutions. - Monitor and report on team progress, sprint velocity, throughput, and delivery health. - Leverage observability and monitoring tools such as DataDog to ensure application performance, reliability, and operational health. - Encourage and guide responsible adoption of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor) to improve developer productivity, code quality, and delivery efficiency. - Contribute to technology and product roadmap planning for business-critical applications under the guidance of the Senior Director of Software Engineering. Qualifications: About You - Strong people management and leadership skills with the ability to coach, motivate, and develop high-performing teams. - Solid understanding of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP/OOD), functional programming, and N-Tier architectures. - Experience working with cloud-based, microservice-oriented systems. - Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Strong organizational, analytical, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills. - Customer-, service-, and results-oriented, with a strong sense of ownership and accountability. - Process-oriented and able to operate effectively in a fast-paced environment with minimal supervision. Experience & Education - Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience. - 6+ years of professional experience across the full software development lifecycle. - Hands-on experience with: - React, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS/Bootstrap - C#, PHP, Laravel Framework - Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, MS SQL, and ODBC - Experience with source control, pull requests, and code reviews using GitHub and Azure DevOps. - Experience working in agile development environments using tools such as JIRA and GitLab. - Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, release management, and deployment automation. - Experience using DataDog or similar observability and monitoring tools. - Understanding of test-driven development (TDD) and testing frameworks such as PHPUnit, Jest, and Google Test. - Knowledge of Linux and Windows operating systems, command-line tools, and basic scripting (PowerShell, Bash). - Comfortable guiding teams in the use of AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor. - Ability to adapt to change and thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced environment. Preferred Qualifications (if applicable): - Experience working with large enterprise software deployments and solution-based products. - Exposure to retail grocery, food retail, or large enterprise technology environments. - Experience working in cross-functional, fast-growing organizations.