Software Engineering Manager

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Full Time Professional KS, Wichita, KS, US

This role leads the people, operating system, and delivery effectiveness of Knowmadics' Advanced Technologies software engineering organization across multiple product and program efforts. The role is expected to carry approximately six to ten senior engineers or technical leads as direct reports, plus selected individual contributors, and to provide managerial accountability for an overall software engineering organization of roughly 20 to 25 people.

Reporting to the CPTO, this role owns day-to-day people leadership, organizational design, workforce planning, performance management, engineering capacity, and cross-team delivery discipline. The Manager partners closely with the EVP of Product, Director of Product, EVP of Production Engineering, program leaders, and senior technical staff. Product leaders retain ownership of product outcomes and priorities; senior technical leaders retain architecture and domain authority;

this role makes those functions more effective by creating clear accountability, healthy teams, and reliable execution.

This is a technical player-coach role rather than a coordination-only position. The Manager stays close to the work through design and code reviews, incident and support investigation, technical planning, and small unplanned contributions when appropriate. Planned roadmap work remains with the engineering teams. The Manager is also a hands‑on owner of the Jira execution model across engineering efforts, helping teams maintain actionable tickets, healthy backlogs, visible dependencies, and credible delivery forecasts without turning process into an end in itself.

Success in this role looks like engineers who receive useful coaching, senior engineers who deliver meaningful impact to the business and grow into effective leaders, product teams that understand what matters next, risks that surface early, and software that moves from prototype through production with predictable delivery, appropriate technical quality, and mission-user trust.

• Lead and develop senior engineers, engineering leads, and selected individual contributors through regular coaching, performance management, growth planning, and succession development.
• Design sustainable reporting lines and team structures; lead hiring, onboarding, retention, workforce planning, and capability development for software engineering.
• Allocate engineering capacity across product, applied research, customer-funded, and internal efforts; resolve priority conflicts, reduce fragmentation, and surface portfolio tradeoffs to the CPTO.

• Own the software engineering operating rhythm across product efforts, including practical Jira standards, actionable backlogs, dependency management, release readiness, and escalation paths.
• Partner with Product and Program leaders to convert priorities and milestones into feasible plans, staffing assumptions, acceptance criteria, and credible delivery forecasts.
• Use flow, quality, and reliability data to identify bottlenecks and improve delivery; keep technical debt, risks, and commitments visible without using metrics as individual productivity scores.

• Stay close to architecture, code, incidents, and technical planning; contribute to small unplanned work when useful without becoming the critical-path owner of planned roadmap features.
• Partner with Staff and Principal Engineers and the EVP of Production Engineering…