Software Engineering Senior Manager

Senior Manager, Software Engineering

Location: Chicago (hybrid)

About The Company

We are a leading global law firm dedicated to excellence and innovation in serving our clients. Our culture emphasizes collaboration, continuous improvement, and forward-thinking approaches. We leverage advanced technology and data intelligence to drive operational excellence and deliver superior outcomes.

Job Summary

We are looking for a Senior Manager of Software Engineering to take technical ownership of our cloud-native automation platform and lead the team that builds and operates it. This is fundamentally a technical leadership role so the ideal candidate is a seasoned engineer first, who happens to be a strong people leader, not the other way around. We are looking for someone whose instincts were forged in cloud engineering, platform development, or full-stack delivery with strong DevOps sensibilities, rather than a background rooted in traditional RPA or low-code tooling.

You will own the architecture of a distributed, event-driven platform running on Azure, guide a growing team of engineers toward cloud-native excellence, and serve as the technical authority on how we design, build, deploy, and operate systems at scale. If you are energized by hard infrastructure problems, take pride in well-crafted code, and know how to bring out the best in an engineering team, this role was built for you.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and ongoing evolution of our cloud-native automation platform, making principled decisions across Azure Container Apps, Service Bus, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Blob Storage to keep the system scalable, reliable, and cost-effective.
• Lead the design of event-driven, asynchronous processing pipelines using Azure Service Bus, ensuring the platform can handle high-volume workloads without sacrificing performance or maintainability.
• Set and uphold engineering standards across .NET backend development — including ASP.NET Core APIs, CQRS with MediatR, Entity Framework Core, and FluentValidation — and provide guidance on TypeScript development for custom integration nodes and webhook management.
• Conduct rigorous code reviews that reinforce SOLID principles, async programming best practices, and sound distributed systems patterns across the team's output.
• Own and continuously improve multi-stage Azure DevOps YAML pipelines, covering infrastructure deployment, container image builds, and environment-specific release strategies.
• Build, manage, and mentor a team of 4–6 engineers (with a path to 8–10), investing deliberately in each engineer's growth in cloud-native development and Azure architecture.
• Engage with business stakeholders to understand workflow automation needs and translate them into technically sound, cloud-native solutions that deliver real operational value.
• Serve as the go-to expert for diagnosing and resolving complex distributed systems issues, including Azure networking problems, private endpoint failures, and Application Gateway routing anomalies.
• Apply analytical rigor to capacity planning, performance tuning, and infrastructure cost management to ensure the platform scales efficiently over time.
  
  

Requirements

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field; candidates with equivalent professional experience and a demonstrable cloud architecture track record will be considered.
• Experience: At least 6 years of hands-on software engineering experience building production-grade, cloud-native applications on Azure; at least 3 years working with Azure Container Apps, AKS, or comparable container orchestration platforms; and a minimum of 2 years leading software engineering teams.
• Cloud & Networking: Deep, working knowledge of Azure networking — including VNETs, subnets, NSGs, private endpoints, Private DNS Zones, VNET peering, Application Gateway, and NAT Gateway — as well as Azure Service Bus, managed identity, and Azure database services including SQL Database with Elastic Pools and PostgreSQL Flexible Server.
• Infrastructure as Code: Expert-level proficiency in Bicep or Terraform, with the ability to author, read, and debug complex IaC modules at scale.
• Backend Development: Strong command of C# and .NET (6 or higher, with .NET 8 preferred), including Web API development, async/await patterns, LINQ, dependency injection, Options pattern, and Entity Framework Core; solid TypeScript/JavaScript skills including async patterns, Node.js, npm/pnpm, and module systems; scripting fluency in Bash or PowerShell.
• Architecture: Proven experience delivering microservices-based distributed systems in production, with deep familiarity with event-driven design, CQRS, Mediator patterns, and container build and deployment workflows.
• Leadership: Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers on cloud-native and distributed systems concepts, lead code reviews constructively, and manage multiple concurrent workstreams with competing priorities.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Azure certifications, particularly AZ-400 (DevOps Solutions), AZ-305 (Infrastructure Solutions), AZ-204 (Developing Solutions), or AZ-104 (Administrator); expert-level fluency with Azure DevOps YAML pipelines including multi-stage configurations, templates, and variable groups.
• Experience with .NET Aspire for cloud-native orchestration and service discovery, or with workflow automation platforms such as n8n, Temporal, Prefect, or Airflow.
• Familiarity with Azure Event Grid and Event Hubs for advanced event-driven architectures.
• Agile credentials such as Certified Scrum Master (CSM) or SAFe Agilist.
• Prior experience in professional services environments — legal, financial services, accounting, or consulting — where compliance and operational rigor are paramount.
• Working knowledge of enterprise security and compliance frameworks including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR.
• Exposure to legal technology ecosystems or document management platforms.