Manager, Software Engineering

Role Overview

Engineering Managers at SugarAI don't sit above the work — they're in it. As an Engineering Manager, you own a single delivery team end-to-end: you're accountable for what they ship, how fast they ship it, and whether they're getting better at both over time. You translate the priorities and strategy your Director sets into a well-run team — clear plans, fast execution, strong agentic development practices, and engineers who are growing and engaged. The management role here is a performance role as much as a people role.

This is not a role for someone who sees management as coordination and communication. It's a role for someone who thinks like a systems designer — who looks at a team's velocity, quality, and AI tool utilization and asks what needs to be built, changed, or removed to unlock the next level of performance. You're building your management fundamentals: learning to drive performance through systems rather than individual effort, developing the judgment to know when to escalate versus when to solve it yourself, and coaching your engineers to do their best work inside an AI-first development model.

If you're energized by the idea of building a team that ships better software faster because of how you lead it — and you want to be an active participant in an engineering culture that's genuinely rethinking how software gets built — this role is for you.

What You'll Do

AI-First Performance & Systems

• Build and operate the team systems that make high-velocity, high-quality AI-first delivery repeatable — not just possible once, but the default way your team works

• Drive full adoption of agentic development practices across your team: SDD/BDD spec standards, agentic tool utilization, attestation review norms, and AI-assisted test generation; don't just encourage adoption, build the workflows and hold the bar

• Track and act on team performance signals: velocity trends, quality metrics, AI tool utilization, spec coverage, and defect rates; use data to coach and improve, not just to report upward

• Identify and eliminate systemic blockers — process gaps, tooling friction, unclear requirements, unresolved dependencies — before they become a drag on delivery

• Stay current with advances in agentic development tooling and bring the most relevant to your team; be the person on your team who knows what's coming next

Delivery & Execution

• Own your team's delivery commitments: scope, sequencing, estimation quality, and on-time execution across sprints and program increments

• Translate strategy and roadmap priorities into well-sequenced team plans with clear ownership, realistic estimates, and explicit risk surface

• Partner closely with product managers and technical leads to drive clear requirements, prevent late-breaking scope changes, and protect engineering focus

• Escalate risks, blockers, and trade-off decisions with enough lead time to be acted on; don't absorb problems — surface them with a recommended path forward

People Development & Culture

• Build a team where people do their best work: high trust, high accountability, candid feedback, and a genuine belief that the work matters

• Coach engineers on agentic development skills — not just tool adoption, but the judgment to work effectively with AI-generated code: when to trust it, when to push back, and how to write the specs that make it useful

• Own the full talent lifecycle for your team: hiring to your bar, onboarding that gets people productive fast, performance management that's honest and timely, and career development conversations that don't wait for review cycles

• Develop the senior engineers on your team into leaders who can own initiatives end-to-end and mentor others; your team's depth is part of your deliverable

Technical Partnership

• Maintain enough technical depth to be a credible partner to your engineers — understand the trade-offs they're navigating, push back when a design is over-engineered, and recognize when a technical decision deserves more scrutiny

• Participate actively in engineering processes: spec reviews, design reviews, architecture discussions, and incident retrospectives; your presence in the work signals that quality is owned, not delegated

• Collaborate with peer EMs, Staff engineers, and your Director to align on cross-team technical practices, shared standards, and architectural consistency

What Success Looks Like

• Your team ships at a predictably high cadence with low defect rates and high attestation quality; performance trends are visible, positive, and tied to specific things you built or changed

• Every engineer on your team is working with agentic tools as standard practice — not experimenting, not dabbling, but working this way because you built the environment where that's the norm

• Engineers on your team are growing: skills are sharpening, scope is expanding, and you can name what each person is working toward and what you're doing to help them get there

• You rarely absorb blockers quietly — your Director knows what's in flight, what's at risk, and what decisions they need to make, before those things become problems

• Peer EMs and your Director describe you as someone with strong execution fundamentals who is developing a point of view on how to lead at scale

Required Qualifications

• Personal fluency with agentic development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or equivalents) — you use these yourself and can coach others on how to work effectively with them, not just point to their existence

• 4+ years of software engineering experience in production SaaS environments; you have genuine technical depth and can engage credibly with the engineers on your team

• 2+ years of engineering management experience with direct responsibility for a team's delivery and people outcomes

• Demonstrated track record of driving adoption of AI-first or agentic development practices within a team — not just championing the idea, but changing how the team actually works

• Hands-on experience with SDD/BDD frameworks, agile delivery, and CI/CD pipelines; you understand the engineering system you're managing, not just the output

• Strong coaching and feedback skills; able to have honest, specific conversations with engineers at all levels about performance, growth, and expectations

• Clear, structured communication; able to represent your team's status, risks, and needs accurately to product and engineering leadership

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience managing in an AI-first or agentic engineering environment where most code is AI-assisted

• Background building or improving engineering team operating systems: sprint cadences, spec review processes, quality gates, or delivery metrics programs

• Experience hiring senior engineers and building teams in a competitive talent market

• Background in B2B SaaS, CRM, or revenue technology

We understand that no candidate is perfectly qualified for any job. Experience comes in different forms; many skills are transferable; and passion goes a long way. Even more important than your resume is a clear demonstration of dedication, impact, and the ability to thrive in a fluid and collaborative environment. We want you to learn new things in this role, and we encourage you to apply if your experience is close to what we’re looking for. We also know that diversity of background and thought makes for better problem solving and more creative thinking, which is why we're dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team.
We use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support our recruiting process, including scheduling, candidate search, prioritization. AI does not make hiring decisions or automatically reject candidates; those decisions are made by people at SugarAI.
Benefits and Perks:
Beyond a stellar work environment, friendly people, and inspiring work, we have some sweet benefits and perks:

• Private medical insurance including basic check-up, hospitalization, and vital care

• Vision exam and discounted glasses every year

• Meal tickets 45 RON/working day

• Gift tickets 300 RON/ Easter & Christmas

• Cultural tickets 200 RON/month

• Health & Wellness reimbursement

• Football Team (only in Craiova)

• Peer to peer recognition program

• Professional development reimbursement program

• Educational Resources - Career & Personal Development Program

• Travel discounts

• Birthday day off

• Extra days off when public holidays fall on weekend days

• Annual Teambuilding

• We are a merit-based company with many opportunities to learn, excel and grow your career!

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