About Responsive

About the Role

Responsive is looking for a hands-on Senior Engineering Manager to lead multiple engineering teams and own the technical outcomes of a major product area, such as the RFP management module or our AI modules. This is a technical role. You will spend roughly 30% of your time in architecture, design and code reviews, prototyping, and implementation, and the rest leading managers, tech leads, and engineers.

You will set the technical direction for your area, build the leadership bench beneath you, and answer for delivery, quality, and reliability. We want someone who leads by example, steps into the hardest problems personally, and owns them through to resolution.

Essential Functions

• Technical Leadership & Strategy: Define and drive the technical vision and roadmap for your product area across Java, React, and MongoDB, and make the final call on architecture and design decisions that cross team boundaries.

• Hands-On Engineering: Spend about 30% of your time on architecture, design and code reviews, prototyping, and implementation, including critical-path work and the hardest production issues.

• Leading Teams and Managers: Manage engineering managers, tech leads, and engineers across levels. Set expectations, run performance reviews, coach, and develop the next generation of engineering leaders.

• Hiring Ownership: Own hiring for your teams end to end. Assess fit during the 3-month probation, write the 90-day report with a clear recommendation, and make the exit call when a hire is not working out.

• AI and Agentic Systems: Guide the design and delivery of AI agents and LLM-powered capabilities, including RAG pipelines, tool calling, and workflow automation, with evaluation, grounding, and cost controls built in from the start.

• Delivery & Quality: Own predictable delivery of roadmap commitments at high quality. Reduce the engineering backlog, close process gaps, and work with Quality Engineering on test automation, release readiness, and quality gates.

• Reliability, Observability & Performance: Set standards for monitoring, logging, and tracing. Own incident response, root-cause analysis, and performance and cost optimization for cloud-based, multi-tenant systems.

• Security & AI Governance: Make sure tenant isolation, access control, and secure data handling are part of every design, and work with Security and GRC on AI governance expectations.

• Cross-Functional Partnership: Work with product managers, designers, support, customer success, and solutions teams to turn customer needs into engineering plans, and handle escalations with clear communication.

• Engineering Practices: Promote strong practices in coding, TDD, CI/CD, DevOps, and agile delivery, and use AI-assisted development tools to raise the team's productivity.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.

• 14+ years of software development experience, with 5+ years in engineering leadership, including experience managing managers or multiple teams.

• Hands-on technical leadership with significant ongoing coding contributions.

• Experience building and shipping AI agents or AI-driven systems in production.

• Experience owning and operating high-scale, highly available, multi-tenant SaaS platforms.

Knowledge & Skills

• Strong expertise in Java and React for full-stack enterprise application development.

• Experience with MongoDB and solid knowledge of relational and NoSQL database design.

• Experience designing and implementing AI-powered applications using LLMs, RAG architectures, AI agents, and workflow automation.

• Proven ability to hire, lead, and develop engineers and engineering leaders, and to build accountable, high-performing teams.

• Experience setting technical direction, running architecture reviews, and enforcing engineering best practices across teams.

• Strong experience with observability and monitoring tools such as OpenSearch, Splunk, New Relic, or OpenTelemetry-based stacks.

• Hands-on experience with cloud-native development on AWS, GCP, or Azure, including Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code.

• Knowledge of search and retrieval technologies such as Elasticsearch and Apache Solr. AI-driven search and NLP experience is a plus.

• Strong understanding of scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, and performance optimization.

• Proficiency in CI/CD, TDD, and DevOps practices.

• Strong problem-solving, decision-making, and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to communicate clearly to executives and to engineers.

• Experience leading teams in Agile environments, with practical knowledge of Scrum and Jira.

Additional Information

What We Offer:

Responsive uses a market-based compensation philosophy. A candidate’s starting base salary will be determined by the specific responsibilities of the role, as well as job-related skills, experience, qualifications, location, and current market trends. For this position, the compensation range is $185,000–$200,000.  Our recruiting team will provide details on the applicable range based on your location during the hiring process. 

Responsive embraces a global flexible workforce model with offices in Dallas, TX, Kansas City, MO, Coimbatore, India and Dublin, Ireland. 

In addition to a competitive compensation package, Responsive also offers the following benefits:

📈 401k with company matching

📚 Unlimited professional development and ongoing learning through LinkedIn Learning Solutions

🏝 4 weeks of paid vacation, paid sick days, and paid bereavement

✈ 4 week sabbatical after 5 years of service

🍀 Mental Wellness Program (EAP) to support your well-being and self-care

🍹 Team events, such as happy hours, off-sites, and team building events

❤️ Best-in-class health benefits, company paid for employee and company contribution for family coverage