Mgr, Digital Engineering

Engineering Manager In The Acquisition Portfolio

An Engineering Manager in the Acquisition Portfolio leads a team of 5-8 full-stack engineers, bridging technical expertise and product partnerships. The day involves being a hands-on technical partner to product management and tech leads, overseeing delivery, and maintaining hands-on technical understanding. This includes actively guiding architecture, code quality, and system design decisions to ensure scalable, high-quality solutions aligned with business objectives.

Overall Tasks and Responsibilities

Overall, the role requires providing strategic direction across teams, establishing operating practices, priorities, and metrics aligned with organizational goals. The manager interprets and applies company-wide policies within the context of engineering delivery, driving effective execution and continuous improvement. They collaborate closely with Product, business leaders, and senior stakeholders to translate complex compensation and advisor needs into well-designed technical solutions. Additionally, the manager leads technical discussions and forums that shape direction, ensure clarity, and support the delivery of business and technology outcomes.

The team maintains and builds highly integrated products and experiences, requiring cross-functional collaboration across Thrivent.

Duties & Responsibilities:

Designing Solutions

• Review technical solution design and architecture and provide guidance and direction.
• Take part in system design and architecture conversations with the team to land approaches to deliver solutions.
• Review technical solution and supports the execution of the solution

Developing Software

• Has Developed software. Can read code and stays up to date on best practices.
• Ensure Code reviews are completed - Problem solving and analytical skills

Learning and applying new techniques

• Promotes and empowers sharing ideas, best practices, etc. They need to make space so teams can take time for these activities.
• Anticipates and analyzes trends in technology and assesses the impact of emerging technologies on the business

Collaborating within team

• Supports the team agile practices and learning events / trainings
• Helps break down barriers for the team
• Engages in sprint demos;
  Understands the desired and actual outcomes as well as the technology delivered by the team
• Partner with Product Manager on Initiatives/ Features/ Epics and provides clarity on desired outcomes as well as technical expertise.
• Collaborates with Product manager for strategies, operating plans, targets and measures for product groups
• Creating a positive team environment where individuals have psychological safety and work collaboratively while understanding, respecting, challenging and appreciating each other's ideas

Collaborating across teams

• Supports and empowers teams to broker solutions across products
• Understands how the product integrates with other products and ensures consistency in approach to work towards a common goal / outcome.
• Builds strong working relationships with peers across teams
• Proactively identifies cross team challenges and works to empower teams in solve collaboratively

Collaborating across the organization

• Align your team with the priorities of the company and the technology organization for a given product area

Setting product/platform technology strategy

• Participates in setting the product and platform technology vision, strategies, initiatives, roadmaps, objectives and alignments
• Represents the business value of technology upgrades, etc. and influences prioritization in the product roadmap
• Empowers the team to select the right tool and platforms for the given product area.

Defining Engineering standards/patterns

• Collaborating with Engineers to ensure Engineering practices and be an advocate to bring the engineering disciplines.
• Promoting engineering practices and continuous improvement such as develops and observability
• Contributes to the creation of enterprise frameworks and patterns

Dev Ops

• Define and supports the development Lifecyle processes
• Supports the team and removes barriers to resolving production incidents/problems
• Dev Ops continuously evaluated through observability, monitoring and alerting
• Understands the health of technology products and promotes prioritization of work to maintain and continuously improve
• Serve as an escalation point in product level support for ongoing maintenance and production issues

Selecting & Managing Technology Vendors

• Be an advocate to the team to define criteria's for selecting the right platform/technology
• Guides the team to build consensus on an approach and driving a build vs buy decision with the team. In a buy decision, works with the team to decide on criteria and vendor selection.
• Execute or manage the overall technology solutions, platforms for the product groups and associated vendor relationships.

Coaching Engineers

• Holding regular 1:1s with team members and team meeting,
• Provides constructive feedback, guidance and coaching to help engineers grow their…