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