The Software Engineering Manager – Web Applications leads and develops a cross‑functional team of software engineers, quality engineers, and technical product managers responsible for delivering and enhancing the company’s customer‑facing quoting platform. This role combines people leadership and technical oversight to ensure high‑quality, scalable web applications that support customer needs and business growth.
What you’ll do
- Lead and manage a high‑performing team of full‑stack engineers, driving the development and iteration of customer‑facing web application and API products
- Support the team with ensuring solutions are scalable and aligned with business needs
- Coordinate cross-functional collaboration across teams in Minneapolis and Amsterdam, establishing strong communication patterns and improving alignment on goals and priorities
- Articulate clear trade-offs among maintenance costs, user impact, and opportunity cost, ensuring every decision prioritizes long-term product health and maximizes team efficiency
- Act as a technical thought leader and strategic partner, interfacing with Product, Sales, and Fulfilment to translate technical possibilities into measurable customer value
- Ensuring clear, timely communication across all levels of stakeholders
- Drive continuous product and platform improvement through structured experimentation, performance evaluation and feedback loops with internal and external users
- Foster a strong engineering team, lead hiring efforts, onboarding and ongoing coaching, while promoting a collaborative, research-driven and delivery-focused team culture
- Collaborate with peer engineering managers to establish engineering standards, tooling, shared UI components and platform infrastructure (CI/CD, observability) for faster, safer experimentation and deployment
What you’ll bring
- 3+ years of experience leading cross-functional teams in high-growth, technical environments
- Proven leadership within product-centric companies with a track record of delivering customer-facing web or mobile applications
- Skilled at cultivating autonomous, high-performance teams by setting a clear technical vision, guiding execution, and serving as a strategic bridge between engineering, product, and data science
- Deep understanding of scalable web architecture (e.g., microservices, event-driven patterns), modern frontend frameworks (e.g., Angular/React/Vue), APIs and cloud-native platforms (e.g., AWS/Azure), with comfort navigating the complexity of evolving platforms
- Experience partnering with UX/product research and directly incorporating customer feedback into planning and prioritization
- Experience with modern DevOps and quality practices (CI/CD, testing, security, accessibility, observability, SLOs/incident management)
- People leadership: proven ability to hire, coach, retain, and develop engineers, strong skills in performance management, career pathing, and building inclusive team culture
- Communication & stakeholder management: exceptional written and verbal communication, comfortable presenting trade-offs, roadmaps and status to stakeholders across the business
- Customer focus: experience building customer-facing products, understanding customer journeys, and prioritizing work based on customer impact and business value
- Technical judgment: ability to evaluate architectures, trade-offs, and technical debt, guide the team on maintainability, scalability, security and observability decisions without being the primary IC
- Cross-functional collaboration: experience working with product managers, designers, data, and operations to deliver end-to-end solutions
What's in it for you?
- Part of our incredible journey is clearly down to our amazing team, and we strongly believe in giving people a space to truly, authentically be themselves. We also believe that treating our employees well and sprinkling a great place to work with some nice perks can make work a little sweeter.
- Annual company bonus. We celebrate success together! Employees are not only rewarded for their achievements but also for contributing to the overall success of the business.
- Wellness and well-being with access to OpenUp psychologists, practice mindfulness with Headspace and tons more.
- Doggo-friendly office. We are big pet lovers and fully encourage hanging out with your (and your colleagues’) furry friends in the office
- Daily Lunch and snacks are provided in the office; it's a moment for our teams to connect and recharge. Shared meals strengthen our bonds and fuel collaboration.
- We offer learning and development days to be used for training or on volunteering, money to spend on learning courses, events, trainings, Access to our in-house LEARN platform with diverse courses, training, and workshops, In-house 3D Printing and much more!
- Follow us on Instagram to see what Life at Protolabs is all about!
Skills Required
- 3+ years leading cross-functional teams in technical environments
- Proven leadership delivering customer-facing web or mobile applications
- Deep understanding of scalable web architecture (microservices, event-driven patterns)
- Experience with modern frontend frameworks (Angular, React, Vue)
- Experience designing and consuming APIs
- Experience with cloud-native platforms (AWS or Azure)
- Experience with DevOps and quality practices (CI/CD, testing, security, accessibility, observability, SLOs/incident management)
- Experience partnering with UX/product research and incorporating customer feedback
- People leadership: hiring, coaching, performance management, career development
- Strong written and verbal communication and stakeholder management
- Ability to evaluate architectures, trade-offs, and technical debt and guide maintainability and scalability decisions
- Experience collaborating with product managers, designers, data, and operations
Protolabs Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Protolabs and has not been reviewed or approved by Protolabs.
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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision options are broadly available and described as good to excellent. Additional protections like short- and long-term disability and life insurance bolster the overall package.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — A starting PTO allotment plus paid holidays, along with added wellness and volunteer time, is emphasized, with some roles noting PTO growth over tenure. Paid caregiver leave appears in postings and supports flexibility for life events.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) with company match and immediate vesting is offered, supporting long-term savings. This foundation is frequently cited alongside core financial benefits as a strong element of total rewards.
Protolabs Insights
What We Do
Protolabs is the world's fastest digital manufacturing source for rapid prototyping and on-demand production. The technology-enabled company produces custom parts and assemblies in as fast as 1 day with automated 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication, and injection molding processes. Our digital approach to manufacturing enables accelerated time to market, reduces development and production costs, and minimizes risk throughout the product life cycle. 3D Printing Our 3D printing service offers a wide selection of materials and technologies to create prototypes and end-use parts with complex geometries and detailed features. With tight process controls, careful design reviews, and extensive quality monitoring, we ensure precise and repeatable 3D-printed parts, every time. CNC Machining We use 3- and 5-axis milling along with turning to machine parts from commercial-grade plastics and metals. Our online quoting system and automated manufacturing process enable us to ship parts within 24 hours, helping customers accelerate development and reduce time to market. Sheet Metal Fabrication Protolabs is an industry leader in quick-turn sheet metal parts for both prototyping and low-volume production. Our digital approach to manufacturing enables us to fabricate sheet metal parts in as fast as 5 days. Additionally, we can support our customers’ development efforts with component assemblies, several finish options, and screen printing. Injection Molding Our injection molding service offers two options—prototyping and on-demand manufacturing—which provide customers a tooling solution that aligns with their project’s requirements. It’s used for quick-turn prototyping, bridge tooling, and low-volume production of up to 10,000+ parts in 15 days or less.
