Engineering Team Manager

Anaqua is looking for a dynamic Engineering Team Manager to lead our Platform & Microservices team spanning development, QA automation, and DevOps. This is a hands-on leadership role — you write code, review architecture, and make technical decisions while managing people and delivery.

You will play a dual role: Product Owner for the platform services (owning the backlog, priorities, and roadmap) and technical team lead who drives Agile execution, engineering excellence, and team growth. You lead by example — your team sees you in the code, in the design discussions, and at the whiteboard.

You'll Love This Job If You Like To:

Team & Delivery Leadership

• Team Management — lead a cross-functional Agile team of developers, QA automation engineers, and DevOps engineers.
• Agile Execution — drive sprint planning, daily stand-ups, backlog refinement, retrospectives, and release coordination.
• Delivery Ownership — own delivery commitments — sprint goals, release timelines, and production readiness.
• People Development — build a high-performing team through hiring, onboarding, mentoring, performance reviews, and career development.
• Stakeholder Management — remove blockers, manage dependencies across teams, and escalate risks proactively.
• Team Culture — foster a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence.

Product Ownership - Platform Services

• Backlog Management — own the product backlog for platform services — prioritizes features, tech debt, and operational improvements.
• Roadmap & Strategy — collaborate with business, product management, and architecture to define roadmap and quarterly goals.
• Requirements — write clear user stories with acceptance criteria; ensure the team understands the “why” behind every deliverable.
• Prioritization — make trade-off decisions between scope, quality, and timelines with a customer-centric lens.
• Cross-Team Alignment — represent the platform in cross-team planning, dependency discussions, and release coordination.

Hands-On Technical Leadership

• Lead by Example — actively participate in code reviews, architecture discussions, and design decisions.
• Backend & Cloud — hands-on development experience with Java microservices, APIs (REST, gRPC), and cloud-native patterns on GCP.
• DevOps Fluency — strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and infrastructure automation.
• QA Understanding — familiarity with test automation strategy — E2E (Playwright), API testing, contract testing, and quality gates in pipelines.
• Technical Decision-Making — ability to evaluate technical trade-offs, guide technology choices, and drive architectural standards.
• Production Ownership — experience with observability, production debugging, incident management, and post-mortem processes.

Engineering Practices

• Establish and enforce coding standards, review processes, and engineering guidelines across development, QA, and DevOps.
• Champion shift-left quality — automated testing, static analysis, security scanning integrated into the development workflow.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) to improve team productivity.
• define and track engineering metrics — deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR.
• Ensure secure coding practices and compliance with organizational security policies.

Agile & SDLC Mastery

• deep practical experience running Scrum or Kanban teams in a continuous delivery environment.
• strong command of the Agile work item hierarchy — Epics, Features, User Stories, Tasks, Bugs.
• Jira mastery — board configuration, sprint metrics, velocity tracking, release planning, and reporting.
• full SDLC ownership — from requirements through development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.
• clear understanding of environments and promotion workflows — Dev, QA, Staging, Pre-Production, Production.

Professional Skills & Mindset

• Proven track record of delivering complex technical projects on time and at quality.
• Dynamic and adaptable — comfortable switching between strategic planning and hands-on problem solving.
• Excellent communicator — translates business needs to technical teams and technical complexity to business stakeholders.
• Customer-centric — every decision is evaluated through the lens of end-user impact.
• Proactive and innovative — brings ideas to improve product, process, tools, and team capabilities.
• Resilient under pressure — maintains clarity and calm during production incidents and tight deadlines.

What You'll Need To Be Successful:

• 10+ years of relevant industry experience required.
• Certified Scrum Master (CSM) or Certified Product Owner (CSPO).
• Experience managing distributed or remote teams.
• ReactJS frontend knowledge for full-stack architectural context.
• Python for scripting and automation.
• Cloud cost optimization and FinOps awareness.
• Background in brand protection, IP enforcement, or digital investigation domains.
• Experience in enterprise SaaS domains.

Anaqua, Inc. is a premium provider of integrated intellectual property (IP) management technology solutions and services. Anaqua’s AQX platform combines best practice workflows with big data analytics and tech-enabled services to create an intelligent environment designed to inform IP strategy, enable IP decision-making, and streamline IP operations. Today, nearly half of the top 100 U.S. patent filers and global brands, as well as a growing number of law firms worldwide use Anaqua’s solutions. Over one million IP executives, attorneys, paralegals, administrators, and innovators in large and medium-sized companies use the platform for their IP management needs. The company’s global operations are headquartered in Boston, with offices across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia. For additional information, please visit anaqua.com, or on LinkedIn.