Engineering Manager

DFnet is a leading data-focused Contract Research Organization (CRO) dedicated to advancing clinical research and supporting life sciences organizations in bringing new therapies to market. The Engineering Manager is responsible for leading a team of individual contributors building and operating a cloud-native SaaS platform, ensuring the delivery of secure, scalable, and high-quality software while balancing technical guidance with strategic planning.

Responsibilities:

• Leads, coaches and develops a team of software engineers and/or SDETs
• Establishes clear expectations, accountability, and performance standards
• Fosters a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and psychological safety
• Conducts regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development planning
• Drives team health, engagement, and retention
• Recruits, interviews, and onboards top SaaS engineering talent
• Promotes ownership mindset and strong engineering discipline
• Leads the design and delivery of a cloud-native SaaS platform
• Guides architectural decisions aligned with scalability, maintainability, and performance
• Ensures adoption of modern engineering practices: CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Automated testing strategies, Code review and quality standards
• Partners with senior engineers on system design and technical roadmaps
• Oversees implementation of multi-tenant architectures and data isolation models
• Supports API-first design and modern frontend frameworks (e.g., React)
• Balances technical debt reduction with feature delivery
• Ensures engineering practices align with secure-by-design principles
• Partners with security and compliance team to meet regulatory requirements (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, 21CFR Part 11)
• Implements secure coding standards and vulnerability management processes
• Oversees audit trails, role-based access control (RBAC), logging, and data protection standards
• Drives proactive risk management and mitigation planning
• Ensures robust disaster recovery, backup, and incident response processes
• Translates product vision into executable quarterly roadmap
• Leads planning, estimation, and delivery forecasting
• Ensures high predictability and accountability in delivery
• Balances long-term architectural investments with near-term customer needs
• Contributes to technical strategy for platform evolution and scalability
• Tracks and reports on engineering metrics (ie. Velocity, throughput, unplanned work)
• Identifies capability gaps and proactively plan hiring and skill development
• Partners closely with Product, UX, and stakeholders to refine requirements
• Communicates trade-offs clearly between scope, timeline, risk, and quality
• Provides transparent reporting to senior leadership on delivery status and risks
• Supports customer conversations when technical context is required
• Fosters cross-team collaboration and reduce silos across engineering domains
• Translates complex technical concepts into business-relevant language

Requirements:

• Experienced
• Leads, coaches and develops a team of software engineers and/or SDETs
• Establishes clear expectations, accountability, and performance standards
• Fosters a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and psychological safety
• Conducts regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development planning
• Drives team health, engagement, and retention
• Recruits, interviews, and onboards top SaaS engineering talent
• Promotes ownership mindset and strong engineering discipline
• Leads the design and delivery of a cloud-native SaaS platform
• Guides architectural decisions aligned with scalability, maintainability, and performance
• Ensures adoption of modern engineering practices: CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Automated testing strategies, Code review and quality standards
• Partners with senior engineers on system design and technical roadmaps
• Oversees implementation of multi-tenant architectures and data isolation models
• Supports API-first design and modern frontend frameworks (e.g., React)
• Balances technical debt reduction with feature delivery
• Ensures engineering practices align with secure-by-design principles
• Partners with security and compliance team to meet regulatory requirements (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, 21CFR Part 11)
• Implements secure coding standards and vulnerability management processes
• Oversees audit trails, role-based access control (RBAC), logging, and data protection standards
• Drives proactive risk management and mitigation planning
• Ensures robust disaster recovery, backup, and incident response processes
• Translates product vision into executable quarterly roadmap
• Leads planning, estimation, and delivery forecasting
• Ensures high predictability and accountability in delivery
• Balances long-term architectural investments with near-term customer needs
• Contributes to technical strategy for platform evolution and scalability
• Tracks and reports on engineering metrics (ie. Velocity, throughput, unplanned work)
• Identifies capability gaps and proactively plan hiring and skill development
• Partners closely with Product, UX, and stakeholders to refine requirements
• Communicates trade-offs clearly between scope, timeline, risk, and quality
• Provides transparent reporting to senior leadership on delivery status and risks
• Supports customer conversations when technical context is required
• Fosters cross-team collaboration and reduce silos across engineering domains
• Translates complex technical concepts into business-relevant language
• Demonstrated ability to adhere to industry regulatory requirements, standards, and DFnet Research Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
• Availability during scheduled work hours and responsiveness to emails, messages, and calls
• Strong executive judgment and decision-making capabilities in complex, regulated environments
• Strong interpersonal skills, communication, characterized by professionalism and a commitment to maintaining confidentiality
• Proficiency with modern collaboration tools and remote-work technologies
• Strong organizational, prioritization, and time-management skills
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills
• Meticulous attention to detail in all tasks
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively at a management level
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of software engineering experience in cloud-native SaaS environments
• 5+ years of direct people management experience leading IC engineers
• Experience building and operating applications in Azure or AWS
• Strong understanding of: Microservices or modular architectures, RESTful APIs and distributed systems, Modern frontend frameworks (React preferred), DevOps practices and CI/CD
• Experience operating in regulated or compliance-heavy environments
• Demonstrated ability to scale teams and systems