Sr. Manager, Software Engineering

Who We Are

At Firstup, our mission is to improve the employee experience at every moment that matters, large and small. As the communication pipeline for the world’s workforce, we now serve 40 of the Fortune 100 companies, reaching and connecting more than 17 million employees daily. Our employees are experts in the employee experience, workforce communications and technology. Joining Firstup means joining a movement to make work better for every worker. As the world’s first intelligent communication platform, Firstup meaningfully engages employees at every moment from hire to retire, and delivers engagement insights to help companies support, promote and retain their talent.

Our Values

• Every employee is an owner with responsibility and credit for our progress.
• Leadership is in our build and we see change as a catalyst for improvement.
• We win as a team, committed to help our coworkers and customers thrive.

Job Summary

We are seeking a Sr. Manager, Software Engineering to lead the delivery of customer‑facing AI‑enabled Web applications for FirstUp’s SaaS platform hosted on AWS, serving hundreds of enterprise customers and millions of users. This role blends technical leadership, people management, and operational ownership. While hands‑on coding is preferred but not required, you are expected to be deeply engaged in technical design and code reviews, ensuring solutions meet high standards for scalability, reliability, security, and quality. You will lead 8–10 geographically distributed software and quality engineers (full time employees and contractors), delivering enterprise‑grade products in a “you build it, you run it” environment. You are a strategic, results‑oriented leader who builds a strong engineering culture and consistently delivers customer value.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and delivery of enterprise‑grade, customer‑facing web applications using modern microservices architectures.
• Provide senior technical leadership through architecture decisions, design reviews, and code reviews, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Drive the thoughtful adoption of Generative AI tools and coding agents to increase developer productivity, improve code quality, and accelerate innovation.
• Partner closely with Product Management and Design to translate complex business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Manage, mentor, and grow a distributed team of software and quality engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Own production health for your teams’ services, including on‑call rotations, incident response, and post‑incident reviews in a “you build it, you run it” environment.
• Lead operational excellence initiatives to improve observability, resiliency, automation, and alignment with defined SLOs and enterprise SLAs.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing and developing engineering teams.
• Proven experience delivering customer‑facing Enterprise SaaS products at scale.
• Strong hands‑on or architectural experience with AWS (compute, storage, networking, security, monitoring).
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud‑native design, and microservices architectures.
• Experience with modern frontend frameworks such as React and backend frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or equivalent technologies.
• Proficiency with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases.
• Demonstrated success operating in a production‑owned, “you build it, you run it” environment.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and decision‑making skills in cross‑functional Agile/Scrum environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience scaling and evolving Enterprise SaaS platforms through periods of growth or technical transformation.
• Demonstrated experience leveraging Generative AI tools and coding agents in software development workflows.
• Exposure to HR Tech or other regulated enterprise domains.

Firstup expects the base salary for this role to be between $190,000-$230,000. The starting rate of pay may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, position offered, location, education, training, and/or experience.

Why Firstup?

Because you care - about people, the work you do, and the connections you make. Work is such a large part of life; it only makes sense to make it awesome. If you want to engage brilliant minds in a high‑growth and inclusive environment where ideas are rewarded regardless of who they come from, join us. This is a rapidly changing space so if you thrive on ambiguity, are hungry for a challenge, and have the guts to speak your mind, you could be a perfect fit. We offer an excellent PTO program, great health benefits, a casual and friendly environment, remote work, and a leadership team who truly believes in your growth – both personally and professionally.

Firstup is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants for employment and to all employees, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, protected disability, veteran status or any other protected status in accordance with applicable federal, state or local laws.