Software Engineering Manager

SmartAction, a fully remote company of ~70 people with an office in El Segundo, provides AI-powered virtual agents as software solutions for organizations across several industries, like retail, hospitality, roadside assistance, healthcare, utilities and more. Our company is going through a big and exciting transformation, which allows our employees and managers to wear several hats, lead strategic projects and be part of something bigger than just “day-to-day operations”.

At the moment we are looking for an experienced software engineering manager for our outsourced offshore team in Vietnam, who will be responsible for leading and coaching a team of 6-8 Software engineers as they develop, test, tune, and troubleshoot our software solutions.

If you are a driven, experienced software engineer who is not afraid to roll up their sleeves and take initiative, you might be the person we are looking for. We work in a highly collaborative environment and rely on all of our employees to be great team players. We are happy to provide a competitive benefit package to our full-time employees, including unlimited PTO, Health, Vision and Dental insurance, 401K, generous paid holidays, stock options, employee recognition awards, active (remote) social events, flexible working arraignments and more.

Responsibilities

• This position reports to the Head of Engineering
• The Offshore Engineering Manager is the direct manager for our outsourced engineers, and is in charge of the day-to-day managerial duties, such as (but not limited to):
  • Operating as a liaison between our internal engineering teams and the offshore team, ensuring efficient knowledge transfer and communication
  • Managing engineering on call schedule and process
  • Review, evaluate and approve work deliverables (e.g code reviews, solution designs, documentation, product specifications)
  • Managing performance and ensuring work quality and
  • Track and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), e.g. velocity, estimation accuracy, quality etc. and adjust operations to meet the goals as needed
  • Ensuring the offshore engineering team is suitably trained to perform all job functions and projects and know how to use software related tools. Addressing and removing knowledge silos
  • Identifying and actively removing roadblocks upstream (e.g. in sales and design) to make work actionable for the team. Translate business requirements into technical specification
  • Identifying and actively removing impediments during development phase to ensure operations run smoothly and without unnecessary delays
  • Assist in project and product management in relation to timelines, priorities and resourcing
  • Ensure best practices and processes/procedures are implemented, followed and enforced (e.g. deployment practices, code reviews, time logging, documentation etc.)
• Joining client calls and internal planning, solutioning and troubleshooting meetings related to projects the offshore team is working on
• Communicate actively and effectively with engineers, QA, project managers, customer insight managers, design team and others as needed to enforce effective cross-departmental collaboration
• Collaborate with the Engineering department leadership to plan how to roll out new innovations to the engineering team from managerial point of view (timeline, resources, communication, etc.)
• Build and maintain efficient and professional working relationships with key stakeholders internally to ensure smooth collaboration on a company-level
• Due to time difference with their team, this position is required to work daily during 4-7 PM UTC-8 time to ensure sufficient overlap with the team’s working schedule.
• Hands on coding may be required for this manager position

The person in this position needs to possess the following skills and capabilities:

Technical:

• C#, .Net, SQL
• APIs (SOAP, POX, REST, etc.)
• Git
• JIRA (plus)

Managerial

• Experience coaching or managing a team of engineers
• Experience working with an offshore/outsourced team
• High integrity and quality standards
• Accountability
• Proactive and ability to take initiative
• Communication and collaboration across departments, fostering team work
• Ability to understand strategy and apply it to operations
• Training, coaching, mentoring, motivating
• Critical thinking and problem-solving skills
• Creating, implementing and enforcing processes and standards
• Time and project management