Senior Engineering Manager

About the Role

Shipper TMS is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to own a team of backend, frontend, and QA engineers building our shipper-facing TMS product. You'll partner with Product and the team's tech leads to set technical direction, run delivery, and grow your engineers - while staying hands-on enough to guide real architecture and code-quality decisions in a Java/Spring Boot backend.

Your first 3-6-12 months will be defined together with your manager: ramp on the codebase and team, then take ownership of roadmap, delivery, and people development.

What You'll Do

Execution & delivery

• Work with Product to turn requirements into well-scoped, sequenced work; set and hold delivery milestones.
• Track team health at each stage of the SDLC; unblock bottlenecks and adjust process as needed.
• Keep your team aligned with other Engineering squads.
• Communicate roadmap, trade-offs, and risk clearly to Product, Design, and other stakeholders — assessed in the panel interview, and day-to-day through cross-team syncs and written updates.

Technical leadership

• Set a technical vision tied to company goals and plan ahead for scale — assessed via a roadmap exercise in the interview, and day-to-day through your quarterly OKRs.
• Own the team's technical roadmap, including strategic tech debt — identify it, size the cost/benefit, and drive prioritization.
• Stay close enough to the code (Java/Spring Boot, Hibernate, RabbitMQ) to ask the right questions, catch bad patterns early, and weigh in on system design and scaling trade-offs — without being the primary code reviewer. In practice: review architecture docs, join incident RCAs for production issues, and run periodic tech-debt reviews for the Shipper TMS backend.
• Set the bar for engineering quality standards: a PR review checklist and minimum test coverage for new code, a rollback plan required before any deploy, and active upkeep of monitoring dashboards and alerts — tuning thresholds and adding new alerts as the system evolves instead of letting them go stale.

People

• Run regular 1:1s, coaching, and performance reviews; guide career growth and delegate ownership.
• Own headcount planning, hiring, and onboarding for your team.
• Track and improve engineer velocity and quality.

Competencies

If you consider yourself an eager learner, a conscientious worker, and a thoughtful, kind, supportive human, you might just thrive at Super Dispatch.

To be successful, you will need a combination of problem-solving, technical, and communication skills. We expect you are:

• Proactive - you act without being told what to do. You bring new ideas to the company.
• Flexible / Adaptable - you adjust quickly to changing priorities and conditions. You cope effectively with complexity and change.
• Move fast - you execute quickly and get things done.
• Growth driven - you seek growth in learning, efficiency, and celebrate wins.
• Customer focus - you are truth-seeking individuals who can empathize with customers. You patiently listen and take feedback to solve problems for customers.
• Communication - You can comfortably communicate in English (speaking and writing). You are able to share knowledge and experience with team members via documentation.

As a manager:

• You are comfortable managing team members with different skill sets from your own.
• You can communicate expectations clearly to all team members, solicit and deliver individual feedback frequently (not just in the scope of review periods).
• You have the ability to run effective 1-on-1s, group discussions, planning sessions, and retrospectives.
• You are capable of identifying the most high-value projects and keeping your team focused on these projects.
• You can prioritize, create alignment, and provide clarity. Beyond being autonomous and guiding your team, you take ownership of problems that you see across the organization, even if they are beyond your defined responsibilities.
• You can develop processes and remove hurdles to facilitate great and fast execution by your team.
• You have a high tolerance for ambiguity and change, especially around organizational structure and the boundaries of your role. You enjoy jumping into whatever areas need attention and learning as-you-go.
• You are able to make decisions in the presence of ambiguity to create clarity for your reports and teams.
• You value empathetic and direct communication, particularly when giving and receiving feedback.
• You have expertise and interest in growing teams: interviewing junior and senior engineers, collaborating with a recruiting team, smoothly onboarding new team members.
• You have strong data-driven prioritization skills and you are unafraid to say no to any level of authority, when things don't look right.
• You have the ability to make sound "code quality vs speed of development" trade-offs.

Minimum requirements

• You have Advanced-level English skills, especially Speaking and Writing.
• You have at least 3 years of experience managing a team of 5-15 people (full-stack, backend, mobile), across various technologies.
• You have demonstrated experience in Lean/Agile management practices.
• You have delivered several large projects (in the context of your team) successfully in the past 3 years.
• You have 5+ years of experience developing software as an IC engineer.
• You have a strong technical background as a Senior Engineer for at least 3 years on the web backend written in Java/Spring (or a comparable high-level backend stack).

Plus points

• You have managed engineering teams at startups before, particularly during periods of rapid growth and organizational change.
• You have experience rolling out engineering and management practices and processes—e.g., code review, performance reviews, and levels and ladders—where they didn't exist before.
• You've managed teams that are partially (or entirely) remote.
• Significant experience in designing and operating critical systems.
• Experience reviewing high-risk PRs (schema migrations, message contracts, query performance) across teams.
• Hands-on experience working with Metabase and Datadog.

What We Offer

• Great Culture - We strive for transparency and you’ll work with like minded highly motivated people excited about solving complex problems
• Remote First Culture - We’re a 100% distributed team!
• Gym/Wellness Stipend - We provide a monthly stipend for gym memberships ($50/month)
• Generous Time Off Flex PTO policy so you can take the time you need, when you need it, as well as 6 weeks paid paternity leave
• Great gear – we’ll set you up for success with the right tech and help you outfit your home office, if needed.

Location Requirement

We’re especially interested in candidates located in Eastern European or Central Asian regions.

Does this sound like you? We'd love to hear from you if so.