Software Engineering Manager

Slingshot Aerospace develops data and software solutions that make space safer and more secure, supporting global security, disaster response, climate monitoring, and critical infrastructure. The Software Engineering Manager will lead a team building backend services, APIs, and integrations, while overseeing team performance, delivery, technical direction, vendor collaboration, and scalable engineering practices.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage a team of software engineers responsible for backend services, APIs, and product integrations
• Support the performance and development of your direct reports through regular one-on-one meetings, timely feedback, performance reviews, career coaching, and actionable development plans
• Recruit, interview, onboard, and retain engineering talent while fostering an inclusive, accountable, and collaborative team environment
• Set clear team priorities, manage delivery commitments, identify risks and blockers early, and communicate schedule impacts and technical tradeoffs to stakeholders
• Provide technical guidance for the backend APIs, services, and integration layers owned by the team, ensuring designs appropriately balance scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, performance, and delivery speed
• Facilitate technical design reviews while empowering senior engineers and technical leads to own implementation-level decisions
• Serve as a primary engineering contact for external vendors and technology partners involved in the team's integrations
• Collaborate with vendor engineering teams to clarify technical requirements, define interfaces, review designs, coordinate testing, manage dependencies, and resolve integration issues
• Establish clear ownership, communication channels, escalation paths, and working agreements that hold internal teams and external partners accountable while maintaining constructive relationships
• Coordinate with Program Engineering, DevOps, QA, Security, Product, and Program Management to align dependencies and deliver complete solutions
• Establish and reinforce team practices for technical documentation, code quality, automated testing, release readiness, monitoring, operational runbooks, and production support
• Promote reuse of shared services, interfaces, AI best practices, integration components, and engineering patterns while maintaining sufficient technical depth to evaluate designs, challenge assumptions, and support engineers without becoming a bottleneck

Requirements:

• Software engineering experience in backend, platform, distributed-system, or integration-focused environments, with strong systems architecture and technical design capabilities
• Experience directly managing or formally leading a software engineering team, including coaching, performance feedback, career development, and team-culture development
• Experience managing team priorities, capacity, technical dependencies, and delivery commitments while translating business, product, customer, and program requirements into executable plans
• Experience designing, building, or operating RESTful APIs, service-oriented or microservice architectures, event-driven systems, and resilient integration workflows
• Experience with Kotlin, RESTful APIs, GraphQL, Kafka, and Typescript
• Experience working with external vendors, technology partners, customer engineering teams, and internal stakeholders to manage cross-team dependencies and deliver aligned solutions
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, including cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, automated testing, release management, observability, security, and production operations, paired with the judgment and communication skills to balance technical quality, delivery needs, team health, and long-term maintainability
• Active or prior TS/SCI clearance
• Experience integrating commercial, government, customer-provided, or vendor-managed software platforms
• Experience coordinating software delivery with third-party vendors that maintain separate roadmaps, release schedules, and engineering processes
• Experience supporting and deploying software within classified, aerospace, defense, national security, space situational awareness, or other mission-critical environments
• Experience managing geographically distributed or remote engineering teams and introducing structure and accountability in fast-moving, ambiguous environments without creating unnecessary blockers