Engineering Service Manager

Summary

Vital Services is seeking a talented and experienced Service Engineering Manager to join our growing Information Technology team. This is an extraordinary opportunity to be a part of, and play an integral role in, the expansion of our Software-as-a-Service team!

The core focus of the Service Engineering Manager will be to lead, mentor, and structurally organize engineering teams executing across multiple client-facing Time and Materials (T&M) work queues, maximizing billable resource utilization and project delivery velocity while protecting a 20% margin target.

In our organization, success in this seat means own-and-deliver execution on these five core areas:

• Queue Management & Resource Allocation: Oversee and triage incoming T&M custom programming and data/reporting request pipelines, ensuring tasks are correctly assigned based on priority, capacity, and skill set.
• Utilization & Margin Optimization: Actively track and drive the engineering team's billable utilization toward an 80% benchmark, identifying and correcting pockets of non-billable bench time or technical overruns.
• Complexity Scoping & Risk Mitigation: Partner with technical leads during sprint planning to ensure custom client requests are properly deconstructed, pointed for technical complexity (systems touched + unknowns), and accurately estimated.
• Delivery Excellence & Quality Assurance: Ensure that software solutions delivered across custom client streams meet internal engineering standards, are security-compliant, and keep production defects low.
• People Leadership & Accountability: Direct, manage, and coach engineering talent; ensure high levels of team fulfillment while enforcing strict operational hygiene across time logs and ticketing systems.

• Experience: 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years of formal team leadership or engineering management experience in a professional services, consultancy, or IT agency ecosystem.
• Multi-Queue Execution: Proven ability to manage concurrent, independent technical work streams across multiple different client platforms simultaneously.
• Strong Scoping Capabilities: Highly proficient at taking vague client requests and translating them into crisp, actionable, risk-adjusted technical backlogs.
• Operational & Financial Acumen: Clear comfort navigating project delivery metrics, billable vs. non-billable time-tracking metrics, and labor-to-revenue ratios.
• Technical Foundation: Solid conceptual understanding of modern application development, secure API architectures, cloud infrastructure, and relational database systems.

To give you complete transparency, here are the numbers this role is accountable for keeping "in the green":

• Managed Team Utilization: Maintain an average billable utilization rate of >= 80% across direct reports.
• Sprint Delivery Predictability: Achieve a >= 80% Sprint Say/Do Ratio across active, managed T&M sprint commitments.
• Jira & Time-Tracking Accuracy: Ensure 100% weekly team compliance on time log submissions, ticket updates, and engineering estimates.
• Escaped Client Defects: Maintain a threshold of < 3 critical, post-delivery bugs reported by clients per quarter.

Final compensation offer will be commensurate with experience and technical assessment results.

Hybrid Flexibility: We value our in-office culture, but offer a flexible hybrid schedule based on team project needs rather than a rigid "clock-in" or "in-office" requirement.

Growth Path: This position was opened due to new client projects and initiatives. As we provide white-glove MSP and SaaS services to our clients, this allows their businesses to grow and in turn allows us to grow. We invest in our employees and our client relationships, which has allowed us to continue to scale up and increase our capacity and growth trajectory.