Software Development Manager

Talis Consulting Group has been retained to recruit a Software Development Manager for one of the fastest-growing retailers in tabletop gaming. Founded in the late ’90s out of the owner’s garage, the company has grown into a global success story, with 400+ employees and more than $130M in annual revenue.

Beyond its record-breaking eCommerce business, the company is also redefining the brick-and-mortar game store experience, with a national expansion underway.

We're looking for a Software Development Manager to lead our eCommerce engineering team and own the customer-facing storefront end to end, including catalog, search, cart, checkout, account management, and buying and selling experiences. You'll build great teams and great software as a player/coach who combines technical depth, delivery leadership, and people management.

You'll stay close to the work by reviewing designs, pairing on complex problems, investigating production issues, and occasionally writing code — always with the goal of teaching and raising the bar. You'll partner closely with Principal Engineers, who establish technical direction, while ensuring consistency and alignment across the team's solutions.

Above all, you'll own predictable delivery against the roadmap: taking large, ambiguous initiatives, breaking them into incrementally shippable pieces, driving realistic estimation, and leading your team to deliver reliably quarter after quarter.

Technical Leadership & Stewardship

• Bring senior-level engineering depth to evaluate designs, challenge architecture, and ensure sound technical decisions while partnering with Principal Engineers on technical direction.
• Establish consistent engineering patterns, conventions, and practices across your team, including contractors and vendors.
• Maintain a high bar for customer experience, including performance, responsiveness, accessibility (WCAG), and SEO.
• Champion the effective and responsible use of approved generative AI tools for software development and help evolve team standards as those tools mature.

• Own the operational health of live, business-critical systems through a "you build it, you run it" model, in partnership with Dev Ops.
• Establish on-call practices, ensure the team can effectively support what it builds, and lead incident response and blameless postmortems.
• Balance reliability and operational demands with feature delivery, recognizing that downtime and poor performance directly impact the business.

• Provide leadership with honest, range-based estimates and refine forecasts using real delivery data.
• Break large, ambiguous initiatives — including multi-year programs — into incrementally shippable capabilities with clear milestones and acceptance criteria.
• Build a culture of accountability where engineers estimate under uncertainty, own commitments, and follow through.
• Work within quarterly planning, long-term roadmap, and Scrum processes while surfacing risks and slippage early and re-planning transparently.
• Coach and mentor engineers across the career ladder, creating clear and actionable growth paths.
• Lead and develop senior technical talent with the maturity to support their growth and advocacy while respecting their technical expertise.
• Own hiring, onboarding, feedback, performance management, and compensation decisions in partnership with the VP of Engineering.
• Lead contractors and vendors to the same standards of quality, accountability, and sustainable execution as internal team members.

• Partner with Product, Design, and business stakeholders to provide reliable feasibility, estimation, sequencing, and technical input into the roadmap.
• Translate business…