What are the responsibilities and job description for the Development Manager position at Aquifer, Inc?
About Aquifer
Aquifer's goal is to empower learners to become the clinicians they imagined themselves to be through online education that serves to dramatically lower the cost of health professions education. We are a virtual learning company with a 98% market share in medical education, and a growing presence in physician assistant and nurse practitioner education. Our pedagogy is the product of the nation's leading medical educators working together to help students acquire core knowledge, clinical reasoning skills and other cognitive competencies. More than 70,000 students complete over 1,000,000 Aquifer cases annually.
Summary
The Development Manager reports into the Chief Technology Officer and owns the engineering capacity, delivery commitments, and technical execution quality across Aquifer's development pods. Directly manages all engineers, including the pod tech leads and a technical architect, with full people-management responsibility. The Development Manager owns release reliability and the delivery/quality dimensions of engineering performance.
Responsibilities:
- Ensure engineering executes the cadence necessary to deliver on roadmap commitments set by the Lead Product Manager.
- Own engineering scorecard metrics for quality and delivery.
- Directly manage all engineers, including both pod tech leads: performance, career development, hiring, day-to-day support.
- Provide meaningful roles and assignments for engineers through talent and capability mapping.
- Own engineering capacity planning, translating roadmap commitments into realistic delivery plans.
- Own release reliability and production quality across both pods.
- Participate in engineering planning at every cadence.
- Lead the effort with the Technical Architect to adopt AI development best practices to increase velocity and quality.
- Support and grow the existing Rails-based product with attention to technical sustainability and delivery cost.
- Partner with the Lead Product Manager and both tech leads on cross-functional delivery planning.
Qualifications
- Proven experience managing engineering teams, engineering managers, or senior individual contributors — ideally in a Ruby on Rails environment.
- Track record of owning delivery commitments and release quality for a live SaaS product.
- Experience managing distributed or multi-site engineering teams.
- Demonstrated ability to evaluate the technical judgment and output of senior or staff-level engineers.
- Comfortable setting and enforcing technical and process guardrails for AI-assisted software development.
- Experience running structured capability assessments (e.g., evaluating a technical architect against defined deliverables) is a plus.
- Working familiarity with Jira/Confluence.
Aquifer's Core Values
- Live the Aquifer non-profit mission — feel the need, create the future, evaluate the impact
- Collaborate wholeheartedly — be proactive and agile, seek first to understand, play well together
- Keep your promises — get stuff done and deliver on time, finish what you started, own the responsibility
- Do the right thing — remember the Golden Rule, put the client first, embrace transparency
- Be bold and fierce — attack the opportunity, show your grit, manage your fear
- Strive for excellence — make your A-game your everyday game, know your stuff, stretch a lot
- Enjoy the journey — take the work seriously and yourself less so, go far together, be well
- Embrace Learning and Growth — be curious, cultivate and contribute knowledge, experiment, fail and adapt