Senior Software Engineering Manager

Location: Vancouver, BC, 100% on-site

Employment Type: Full-time

Experience Level: Senior, 8+ years in engineering, 4+ years in management

Company

Punt is a Vancouver-based, founder-led technology company behind two of the largest social casinos in North America. We’re evolving into a prediction-led super app—integrating prediction markets, social gaming, and new product surfaces into a single, cohesive experience. Our backend already operates at scale, processing high-volume, real-money transactions. We’re building toward a new category: the most advanced and engaging social gaming platform in the world.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Software Development Manager to lead and scale a high-performing engineering team responsible for building, operating, and evolving core product and platform systems.

This is a staff-level engineering management role for someone who can combine strong technical judgment with excellent people leadership, delivery ownership, operational maturity, and cross-functional execution. You will manage engineers, improve team effectiveness, partner closely with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Data, Security, and executive leadership, and ensure the team consistently ships high-quality, reliable, secure, and scalable software.

The ideal candidate has a strong engineering background across backend systems, frontend product development, cloud infrastructure, Dev Ops, and production operations. You do not need to be the deepest hands-on expert in every layer, but you must be credible enough to guide technical direction, challenge architectural decisions, raise engineering standards, and coach engineers through complex tradeoffs.

This role is for a manager who is still close to the work: someone who understands modern software delivery, uses AI-forward engineering practices, cares deeply about system reliability and product quality, and can build the operating mechanisms required for a fast-growing engineering organization.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of software engineers across backend, frontend, platform, and full-stack work.
• Own team delivery, execution quality, engineering health, and operational outcomes for business-critical product and platform initiatives.
• Partner with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Data, Security, and company leadership to translate business priorities into clear technical plans, milestones, and delivery commitments.
• Establish strong team operating rhythms, including planning, prioritization, estimation, execution tracking, design reviews, code reviews, release readiness, incident follow-up, and continuous improvement.
• Raise the engineering bar for architecture, maintainability, observability, test quality, documentation, security, reliability, and production ownership.
• Guide technical decision-making across Laravel/PHP backend systems, React/Next.js or comparable frontend surfaces, APIs, data stores, queues, caches, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and production operations.
• Ensure the team builds systems that are scalable, secure, performant, maintainable, and operable under real production load.
• Improve Dev Ops and SRE practices, including deployment safety, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, incident response, on-call health, post-incident reviews, and reliability improvements.
• Build a strong engineering culture of ownership, pragmatic architecture, high-quality execution, AI-assisted development, operational accountability, and continuous learning.
• Mentor engineers through career development, feedback, performance management, technical growth, and leadership opportunities.
• Hire, onboard, and retain strong engineering talent, while improving interview loops, calibration, onboarding, and role expectations.
• Identify and resolve execution risks, technical risks, delivery bottlenecks, team-health issues, and cross-functional misalignment early.
• Act as an escalation point for complex delivery, technical, people, and production issues.
• Use data and judgment to improve team performance, including delivery predictability, system reliability, defect rates, incident trends, cycle time, and engineering throughput.
• Help mature engineering processes…