Software Engineering Manager

Leads the people, technical work, and organizational relationships responsible for developing embedded software and firmware for RF measurement and instrumentation products. Our products combine technologies such as embedded firmware, real-time operating systems, embedded Linux, programmable logic, digital signal processing, networking, and hardware control. This role requires sufficient technical depth to guide architecture and engineering decisions, the people-leadership ability to build a capable and accountable team, and the organizational perspective to lead effectively across functional boundaries. The manager will help the team translate product needs into sound architectures, clear requirements, disciplined implementation, effective verification, and reliable products that can be supported throughout their lifecycle.

The manager is expected to remain technically engaged but is not expected to be the team’s deepest specialist in every technology or to serve as the primary implementer. Success depends on asking good questions, recognizing risk, drawing on the expertise of others, making sound decisions, and developing the team’s ability to operate with accountability and increasing independence. Strong candidates may have developed these capabilities through different combinations of engineering, technical leadership, project leadership, and formal people management. .

GENERAL FUNCTIONS / SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES:

Technical Direction and Engineering Judgment

• Guide embedded software and firmware architecture for new products and major product revisions.
• Help translate product and system needs into clear, implementable, and testable software requirements, interfaces, and acceptance criteria.
• Work with domain experts to allocate functionality appropriately across processors, programmable logic, hardware, firmware, and application software.
• Promote maintainable software structures, stable interfaces, well-understood data flows and state behavior, and effective error-handling and recovery strategies.
• Lead or facilitate technical trade studies and design reviews involving performance, timing, communications, memory, power, security, testability, and maintainability.
• Ensure important technical decisions, assumptions, risks, and tradeoffs are supported by appropriate analysis, prototyping, measurement, or other objective evidence.
• Establish development and verification practices appropriate to the product risk, including design and code review, configuration management, reproducible builds, progressive integration, regression testing, release control, and structured defect investigation.
• Encourage purposeful experimentation to answer defined technical questions and use the results to improve requirements, architecture, plans, and decisions.
• Identify technical risks early and establish practical plans to reduce or retire them.

People and Team Leadership

• Recruit, retain, coach, and develop embedded-software and firmware engineers.
• Establish clear expectations for technical quality, ownership, documentation, communication, collaboration, and execution.
• Provide timely, candid, and constructive feedback, recognize strong performance, and address performance concerns fairly and directly.
• Delegate meaningful ownership while providing the direction, context, and support engineers need to succeed.
• Assign work with consideration for technical needs, project priorities, employee capabilities, workload, and development goals.
• Develop engineers’ capabilities in architecture, requirements, design analysis, testing, debugging, communication, and cross-disciplinary systems thinking.
• Build a culture in which engineers raise risks early, challenge assumptions constructively, debate technical alternatives objectively, and learn from mistakes.
• Hold the team accountable for complete engineering deliverables-including requirements, design, implementation, documentation, verification, integration, release, and lifecycle support-not only for producing code.

Technical Team Leadership and Execution

• Give the software team clear priorities, decision frameworks, ownership boundaries, and definitions of success.
• Develop credible plans and estimates based on technical scope, uncertainty, dependencies, staffing, integration needs, and verification effort.
• Distinguish preliminary estimates from commitments supported by adequate requirements and architecture work.
• Maintain visibility into progress, technical risk, resource constraints, dependencies, and unresolved decisions.
• Balance new-product development with sustaining work, defect correction, infrastructure improvement, and appropriate reduction of technical debt.
• Help the team make timely decisions without bypassing necessary engineering work; tailor the level of analysis, documentation, review, and process to the consequences and uncertainty involved.
• Strengthen the team’s ability to plan, design, implement, test, integrate, release, and support complex products with increasing independence.

Cross-Functional and Organizational Leadership

• Represent software opportunities, constraints, and risks in product, system, and business decisions.
• Partner closely with systems, electrical, RF, FPGA, test, quality, manufacturing, service, and product-management teams.
• Help establish clear ownership and resolve priorities, requirements, interfaces, and dependencies that cross functional boundaries.
• Communicate technical status, uncertainty, tradeoffs, resource needs, and risk clearly to engineers, managers, executives, and other stakeholders.
• Contribute to product feasibility, project authorization, architecture reviews, risk assessments, phase-gate decisions, and lifecycle planning.
• Support the testability, diagnosability, manufacturability, serviceability, security, and long-term maintainability of the complete product.
• Contribute to staffing, capability, technology, platform, supplier, and obsolescence plans that extend beyond a single project.
• Improve engineering practices across the organization in ways appropriate to the products, risks, team, and scale of the business.

• A BS in computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Substantial experience contributing to the development of complex embedded software, firmware, or closely related systems.
• Demonstrated technical judgment, including experience helping define architectures, resolve significant technical risks, guide integration, or diagnose complex system behavior.
• Demonstrated success leading and developing engineers. This evidence may come from formal management, technical or project leadership, mentoring, or a combination of these experiences.
• Ability to organize ambiguous technical work, establish priorities and ownership, and guide a team toward clear decisions and deliverables.
• Ability to work effectively across engineering disciplines and communicate decisions, risks, and tradeoffs to both technical and nontechnical audiences.

Technical Foundation

The successful candidate should bring meaningful depth in several areas relevant to our work and the ability to learn or lead through others in areas outside their own specialty. Relevant experience may include:

• Embedded C or C++ and resource-constrained systems
• Real-time systems, interrupts, concurrency, synchronization, timing, or deterministic behavior
• Embedded Linux, RTOS-based applications, board-support packages, bootloaders, or device drivers
• Hardware/software interfaces, networking, communications protocols, data acquisition, calibration, or hardware-control software
• Software architecture, interface definition, state modeling, error handling, requirements development, or system decomposition
• Unit, integration, regression, and hardware-in-the-loop testing; static analysis; continuous integration; or controlled build and release practices
• Investigation of interactions among software, firmware, FPGA logic, digital hardware, analog hardware, and physical system behavior

Experience with every item above is not required. We are interested in the candidate’s command of engineering fundamentals, the quality of their decisions, how they approach unfamiliar problems, and their ability to recognize when specialist expertise is needed.

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS: (list functions required to do the job)

Able to use phone; communicate using speech; hearing and vision skills; sit or stand for moderate periods

Tuition reimbursement, Paid parental leave, Parental leave, 401(k), Health insurance, Vision insurance, Dental insurance, Disability insurance Full-time Hybrid work in 30303 Aurora Rd, Solon, OH 44139

Full job description

Bird is recognized as the expert in RF communications, measurement and management providing innovative RF products, systems, services and educational solutions to the wireless industry. Our employees enjoy working for a privately owned manufacturing business where their contributions make a great impact. Bird offers a competitive wage/benefit package, including medical/dental/vision, basic life, short term and long term disability, paid parental leave, 401K, tuition assistance, and gainshare bonus.