[Hiring] Senior Engineering Manager @Alianza, Inc.

Role Description

Alianza is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team of around 6 to 7 senior engineers, mostly New Zealand based with a few further afield, within a fully global engineering organisation. First and foremost, this is a people-leadership role. Your main job is to lead and develop a capable, motivated team, and much of your impact comes through them. Beyond the team, you'll bring technical leadership and own project and product delivery.

What your team does

• The team works across a set of carrier-grade voice and communications products that are live with service providers today.
• The work is a mix of project delivery and ongoing engineering to keep those products stable, performant, and secure.
• Responsibilities include complex defect fixes, regular releases, and responding to critical, customer-affecting issues.
• A big part of the role is balancing planned work against the unplanned and deciding with Product Management what the team takes on next.

How we work

• This is a fully remote role based in New Zealand, with an annual in-person team gathering.
• Staying in sync across time zones requires flexibility with hours, including some calls outside the usual nine-to-five.
• We use AI tools widely and encourage their use; prior experience isn't required, but openness to working this way is essential.

Key responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and develop the team: regular one-to-ones, honest feedback, and support for each person’s growth, while giving them the autonomy to own their work.
• Plan and run delivery: set priorities, manage release cycles and dependencies, keep work predictable, and keep stakeholders clear on progress, risks, and trade-offs.
• Own the backlog with Product Management: balance project work against defects, stability, tech debt, and support to ensure effort stays on what matters most.
• Own critical support issues to resolution: work within the escalation path on customer-affecting problems, get to the root cause, and ensure required fixes and follow-ups get delivered.
• Own technical direction for the team’s products: build strong knowledge of the products and domain, and use it to shape the roadmap and technical decisions with Product and Engineering.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years managing engineering teams and a track record of delivering with little oversight.
• A technical degree (CS or STEM preferred) or equivalent experience.
• Broad technical skills and strong judgement in a complex domain, able to support the team across most challenges and bring clarity to ambiguous problems and high-pressure incidents.
• Experience running both planned delivery and reactive support and prioritising well when they compete for the same people.
• Clear communication and strong cross-functional relationships, partnering with Product Management and Technical Leads and coordinating across time zones.
• Telecoms or a similarly complex domain, including familiarity with SIP/VoIP and carrier-grade fundamentals, is a plus but not required.

Benefits

• If this role excites you but you don’t tick every box, please apply anyway.
• Research shows that women and some underrepresented groups tend to hold back unless they meet every requirement, and we’d still love to hear from you.