[Hiring] Engineering Manager - Network Solutions @Nexcess

Role Description

You will run and own one engineering team end-to-end: its architecture design, its delivery, and its roadmap. This is a hands-on engineering role, and you are the one person who answers for what the team lands.

• The work in flight is the visible part. The job is the machine around it: how work is scoped and cut each month, what stands between a change and production, how much of it is AI-assisted, and how much of the team's week goes to things that are not engineering.
• Business alignment and focus come first. Engineering exists to move the business, not to be busy.
• You will pick the few things that matter most, say no to the rest out loud with the Product counterpart, and deliver them on dates the business can plan around, at a quality that does not come back as an incident or a customer escalation.
• This job is hands-on, and more so every quarter.
• Management layers are deliberately thin; a manager who has stopped reading code cannot lead a team whose code is mostly AI-generated.
• You will write specs, review pull requests yourself, run the AI harness daily, and ship real work.
• Whoever ships it owns it, regardless of who wrote it.
• Most code is AI-generated now, so the judgment moved to either side of it: specifying exactly what to build, and verifying that what came back is correct, secure, and operable.
• You will be Product's best friend, shaping the roadmap together and making trade-offs legible early.
• Your team goes on call for what it builds, and you take your turn on the rotation.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software engineering, including at least one year leading engineers formally or informally.
• Hands-on technical fluency in: Perl, PHP, React, and Vue; relational databases (Postgres, MariaDB); firewall and load balancer configuration; VPN; HAProxy; nginx; switching and VLANs; and configuration management.
• Currently hands-on; you have shipped code recently and can read a diff and review a pull request of AI-generated code.
• Real, hands-on AI-assisted engineering, with impact you can quantify.
• Evidence you have made a team measurably faster.
• Delivered and modernized software to committed dates, including collaborative scoping and data-driven forecasting.
• A must: experience in managed hosting, cloud, or another high-availability service business.

Requirements

• Own architecture design, delivery and roadmap for your team.
• Build the partnership with Product that makes the roadmap real.
• Own the engineering outcomes for Network Solutions' product space.
• Stay in the work; write the specs, review pull requests yourself, and ship real changes.
• Run the AI harness yourself, and make your team run it.
• Scope and cut the work; turn roadmap items into scoped, estimated work.
• Clear cross-team engineering dependencies before they block you.
• Hold the engineering bar that gets your team to DORA High and beyond.
• Grow your engineers; one-to-ones actually held, a current growth plan for each, and direct feedback given early.
• Own what you run, not only what you ship.

Benefits

• Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential duties.
• Works at a desk and computer screen for extended periods of time.
• Works in a traditional climate-controlled office environment or from home.
• Works in a highly stressful environment dealing with a wide variety of challenges, deadlines, and diverse employee population.

Company Description

Network Solutions engineers and maintains the physical and virtual customer network products (load balancing, switching, firewalls, VPN, and VPC) that connect and protect our customers' infrastructure.