Software Engineer Manager

Vaco is partnered with a national client to recruit and bring a technology leader who can help them scale smarter and bring an innovative mindset to the organization. In this Engineering leadership role, you will lead a team responsible for building internal technology products, business automation solutions, and AI-enabled capabilities that simplify work across HQ, support teams, and field operations. You will manage engineering delivery from idea to production, combining strong software engineering discipline with a practical understanding of AI-native development, agentic workflows, secure integrations, and value-stream automation. In this role, you will be accountable for delivering working software, not just prototypes. You will bring real world experience building teams who understand how to partner with business stakeholders, and translate operational problems into scalable, secure, and maintainable products that are growth accelerators. This is a core hire and we're looking to connect with top talent quickly. If you are interested and ready to take on an opportunity like this, reach out to the Vaco team today to learn more. We are unable to work with 3^rd parties.

• Experience: 7+ years of progressive software engineering, application development, or platform delivery experience, with 3+ years in a people leadership role responsible for coaching, hiring, performance management, and staff development.
• Product delivery experience: Proven experience leading teams that build and operate internal technology products, enterprise applications, workflow tools, or customer/employee-facing digital experiences.
• AI fluency: Strong familiarity with generative AI, AI-assisted engineering tools, agentic workflows, tool/function calling, RAG, enterprise knowledge retrieval, and responsible AI practices. This role does not require being an AI research scientist, but it does require the ability to lead teams building AI-enabled products safely and effectively
• Engineering discipline: Strong understanding of full-stack application development, API-first design, cloud-native systems, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, secure coding, and production support.
• Integration and gateway experience: Experience building secure integrations across internal services, SaaS platforms, data sources, and API/service gateway patterns such as Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, or similar platforms.
• Business process automation: Demonstrated ability to understand end-to-end business processes or value streams, identify opportunities for automation and process improvement, and lead teams that combine technology change with improved ways of working.
• Execution mindset: Proven ability to move from ambiguous business problems to clear scope, technical design, delivery plans, measurable outcomes, and production adoption.
• Communication and executive presence: Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical topics to business leaders and translate business needs into actionable engineering work.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Business, or a related field is required; equivalent experience may be considered.