Senior Engineering Manager

Title: Senior Engineering Manager Location: Canada

Riva is seeking a strategic and people-focused Senior Engineering Manager to lead and elevate our globally distributed engineering teams. In this role, you’ll champion technical excellence, build resilient SaaS architectures, and nurture a high-performing, inclusive team culture. You’ll play a critical role in shaping our product delivery, engineering practices, and team success.  

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING 

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will build and support a globally distributed, innovative, and successful engineering team. Your mission will be to drive best-in-class software development practices, deliver reliable and scalable SaaS solutions, and create a collaborative, transparent, and innovative engineering culture. 

More specifically, your responsibilities include: 

• Lead and structure globally distributed engineering teams to deliver against company goals. 

• Provide direct management to Engineering Managers, Team Leads, and Testing Leads; conduct regular 1:1s and skip-levels. 

• Oversee performance management, goal setting, development planning, and annual compensation decisions. 

• Ensure delivery of scalable, high-quality features aligned with product and business priorities. 

• Foster an inclusive, supportive team culture rooted in psychological safety and technical excellence. 

• Partner with the Product team to ensure effective staff allocation and strategic execution. 

• Drive engineering roadmap planning and contribute to business goal achievement. 

• Define and track engineering KPIs (e.g., DORA metrics, quality metrics, velocity). 

• Oversee recruitment strategies and lead hiring initiatives in collaboration with HR. 

• Manage engineering budgets and drive SaaS cost optimization through efficient architecture and operations. 

• Champion engineering best practices and continuous improvement across SDLC processes. 

• Lead innovation projects and cross-team technical initiatives that move the business forward. 

• Ensure compliance with data security and privacy standards (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR). 

WHO ARE YOU 

You’re a highly skilled technical leader with deep SaaS experience and a passion for growing and enabling high-performing teams. You value autonomy, transparency, and collaboration. You love solving complex engineering challenges while investing in people, culture, and scalable practices. 

More specifically, you bring: 

• Proven experience managing product engineering teams in cloud-native SaaS environments 

• Track record of building and scaling high-performing engineering organizations 

• Expertise in performance management, coaching, and career development 

• Strong leadership in remote-first and globally distributed team environments 

• Experience partnering with cross-functional teams including Product, HR, and Business Operations 

• Deep understanding of Agile practices and modern SDLC 

• Strong budget management and business acumen 

• Excellent communication, strategic thinking, and problem-solving skills 

Hard Skills & Technical Expertise 

• Strong knowledge of SaaS architecture, including multi-tenancy, scalability, and uptime strategies 

• Deep experience designing and operating distributed backend systems, including concurrency, retries, idempotency, fault tolerance, and eventual consistency.

• Strong proficiency with C#/.NET backend architecture, including modern .NET, asynchronous programming, dependency injection, testing, and performance optimization.

• Experience designing background processing and job orchestration systems, including scheduling, queues, worker patterns, retries, backoff, and dead-letter handling.

• Serverless architecture and microservices development 

• CI/CD pipelines and quality automation frameworks 

• Observability and incident response practices (monitoring, logging, tracing with tools like CloudWatch, Splunk) 

• Modern API design (REST, GraphQL, API Gateway patterns) 

• Secure development practices, including IAM policies, authentication, and authorization 

• Familiarity with compliance and security frameworks (SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA is a bonus) 

• FinOps principles and experience optimizing cloud infrastructure cost 

BONUS POINTS FOR: 

• Deep experience with AWS core services (IAM, EC2, VPC, ECS, EKS, Lambda, RDS, CloudWatch, etc.)

• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation) 

• Containerization and orchestration expertise (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS)

• Experience managing through rapid scale or post-product-market fit growth 

• Background in data engineering, ML/AI infrastructure, or DevOps tooling 

• Experience working with Salesforce, Outlook/Exchange, or CRM integration platforms 

• Experience leading strategic engineering initiatives across multiple teams  

CORE COMPETENCIES FOR SUCCESS

• Integrity & Accountability: Acts with honesty and responsibility, takes ownership of actions and decisions, and raises risks or concerns early.
• Collaboration: Embraces diverse perspectives and works effectively with Engineering, Product, Quality Assurance, and leadership to achieve shared goals.
• Continuous Learning: Consistently seeks opportunities to expand technical, leadership, and AI capabilities.
• Design Thinking: Uses creativity, emerging technologies, and customer-centered approaches to solve complex problems.
• Analytical Thinking & Decision Making: Evaluates information, risks, and tradeoffs to make clear and well-reasoned decisions.
• Managing Resources & Digital Dexterity: Adapts to new technologies while effectively managing time, priorities, and team capacity.
• Operational Alignment & Coordination: Ensures engineering activities are coordinated, efficient, and aligned with product and organizational objectives.
• Talent Management & Development: Develops team members through coaching, feedback, mentorship, and meaningful growth opportunities.
• Innovation: Encourages experimentation and creates an environment where new ideas and approaches can be explored responsibly.

MORE ABOUT RIVA

We are an Edmonton-based software development company with a global footprint. Our Relationship Engine creates seamless data flow between applications such as email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and CRM platforms, synchronizing data and reducing task switching, application toggling, and duplicate data entry.

This role offers the pace, ownership, and autonomy of a startup environment within a stable, profitable, and growing company with established customers. You will join a small, collaborative team that supports one another and is actively shaping how AI is used both within our products and throughout the development process.

Riva provides a clear technical career path, with opportunities to progress toward a Staff-level engineering role and ultimately pursue either an architecture or people-management path.

We offer a work culture that fosters diversity, equity, inclusion, and fun, where curiosity is rewarded and each day offers the opportunity to learn, grow, and contribute alongside people you like, respect, and value.

WHAT WE BRING TO THE TABLE

• RRSP/TFSA matching.
• Paid vacation starting with three weeks.
• Paid wellness time for mental health, personal appointments, and personal needs.
• Paid time off to volunteer with charities of your choice.
• Extended health care benefits, dental coverage, and life insurance.
• Professional development and training allowance for career advancement.

Applicants must hold a valid Canadian work permit or be a permanent resident or citizen of Canada.

Riva is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.

We appreciate all applicants for their interest in joining Riva. Please note that only candidates selected to move forward in the process will be contacted.