Manager, Software Engineering - IAM

We are seeking a Software Engineering Manager - IAM to lead a high-performing engineering team driving our enterprise Identity & Access Management (IAM) platform. In this role, you will balance technical leadership, team management, and operational execution—ensuring our central authentication, single sign-on (SSO), and infrastructure automation deliver high performance, strict SLA adherence, and bulletproof security.

While a background in IAM or security infrastructure is a major advantage, we value strong technical fundamentals, deep architectural acumen, exceptional organization, and a fast-learning mindset above all. You will work closely with our Technical Product Owner and Staff Engineer, diving deep into our platform functionality, actively participating in acceptance testing, and ensuring high-quality software delivery.

What You’ll Do

• People & Team Leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers. Foster a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, accountability, and psychological safety.
• Deep Product & Quality Ownership: Dive deep into our identity services and Keycloak extensions to thoroughly understand feature workflows and business logic. Actively assist with user acceptance testing (UAT) and quality validation before releases.
• Architectural Oversight & Challenge: Participate in design reviews and technical discussions—evaluating system trade-offs, keeping up with senior engineers, and challenging architectural assumptions to ensure scalable, resilient design.
• Testing & CI/CD Standards: Drive a strong culture of automated testing (unit, integration, and end-to-end) and robust CI/CD practices to ensure reliable, zero-downtime deployment pipelines.
• Engineering Execution & Delivery: Partner with the Technical Product Owner to drive delivery schedules, manage engineering velocity, unblock team members, and navigate technical dependencies.
• SLA & Performance Focus: Establish and track operational metrics to ensure our platform consistently meets or exceeds strict uptime and latency SLAs.
• AI-Accelerated Leadership: Encourage and guide the team in adopting AI-driven software development tools (e.g., Claude Code, LLM-based testing automation) to boost engineering efficiency and quality.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Security, Compliance, and Product leadership to ensure alignment on security standards and platform delivery goals.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience: 3 years of engineering management experience leading backend or platform software development teams, backed by 5 years of hands-on software development experience.
• Strong Technical & Architectural Foundation: Solid background in object-oriented language design and backend systems (experience in Java or C# is a strong plus). Must possess strong software architectural knowledge to guide design decisions and challenge technical approaches.
• Testing & CI/CD Literacy: Deep understanding of modern software testing methodologies, automated test frameworks, and modern CI/CD deployment workflows.
• Product Depth & Hands-On QA Mindset: Willingness to roll up your sleeves, learn the intricacies of our products, and actively engage in acceptance testing to maintain a high bar for release quality.
• Organizational Excellence: Exceptional track record of managing competing priorities, planning capacity, and keeping complex technical initiatives organized and on schedule.
• Fast Learner: Proven ability to rapidly ramp up on complex technical subdomains (such as identity protocols, authorization models, or security infrastructure).
• Communication & Collaboration: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, capable of translating engineering updates to leadership and advocating for your team's needs.

Nice-to-Haves / Strong Pluses

• Prior background as a Software Architect or Lead Engineer.
• Experience with continuous process improvement informed by data, particularly using Kanban or Agile metrics.
• Proven track record of driving engineering teams to meet and exceed operational SLAs.
• Prior exposure to Identity & Access Management (IAM), OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, or Keycloak environments.
• Experience with cloud-native deployment practices, containers, and infrastructure-as-code concepts (Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, ArgoCD).
• Experience promoting AI developer tool adoption within an engineering organization.