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.

Role

We're looking for a Software Development Manager to lead the company's Operations engineering team — the team behind the internal systems that support Warehouse Management, ERP, inventory, and Customer Service tooling. Every order shipped, every card graded, and every customer issue resolved runs through software your team owns. When your systems perform, the warehouse moves; when they don't, it stops.

Your team builds and operates deeply integrated, data-intensive backend systems. Integration is the core discipline here — your services are the connective tissue between warehouse operations, inventory, fulfillment, customer service, and the robotics automation systems on the warehouse floor. Getting data flowing reliably across those boundaries, keeping it consistent, and ensuring internal users have tools that actually work under operational load is how your team delivers value.

You'll stay close to the work — reviewing designs, pairing on hard problems, digging into production issues alongside the team, and occasionally writing code — always in service of teaching and raising the bar. You'll partner closely with the Principal Engineer(s), who set technical direction, and you'll champion consistency and alignment across the team's solutions rather than letting one-off approaches accumulate.

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

Technical leadership & stewardship

• Bring senior-level engineering depth to evaluate designs, challenge architecture, and keep your team's technical decisions sound — partnering with and amplifying the Principal Engineer(s) who author technical direction.
• Steward engineering standards: drive consistency in patterns, conventions, and practices across your team (including contractors and vendors), treating deviations as deliberate, reviewed exceptions.
• Hold a high bar for integration quality — data consistency, API reliability, event-driven correctness, and clean service boundaries — across a landscape of tightly coupled operational systems.
• Raise your team's effective, responsible use of generative-AI tooling for software development, within approved tools and policies — and help mature those standards as they evolve.

Operational ownership

• Own the operational health of your domain's live systems under a "you build it, you run it" model — your team operates what it builds, in partnership with the DevOps team who provide infrastructure and platform patterns.
• Establish your team's on-call rotation and ensure the team can support what it builds; lead incident response within the engineering-wide incident management process — consistent across teams, and one you'll help shape — and run blameless postmortems that drive systemic fixes.
• Own the business impact of reliability — for warehouse operations, system downtime halts shipping throughput — and balance operational load against feature delivery so neither is starved.

Delivery & predictable execution

• Give leadership honest, range-based estimates early, and tighten them with real data from completed work as delivery progresses.
• Decompose large, ambiguous initiatives — including year-plus programs — into incrementally shippable capabilities with clear milestones and acceptance criteria.
• Build a culture of accountability: coach engineers to lean in, estimate under ambiguity, own their commitments, and follow through — moving the team from "I can't estimate that yet" to "here's my best estimate and the assumptions behind it."
• Work within the delivery structure (quarterly planning, a longer-term roadmap, Scrum ceremonies), upholding it consistently while helping improve it over time; surface slippage early and re-plan transparently.

People leadership & talent

• Coach and mentor engineers across the engineering ladder; assess where each person sits and build concrete growth paths — including managing the Principal Engineer with the maturity to own their growth and advocacy while deferring to them technically.
• Own hiring for your team; give direct, timely feedback; address underperformance; make performance and compensation decisions in partnership with the VP of Engineering.
• Onboard and direct contractors/vendors who temporarily augment the team, holding them to the same standards; set a culture of quality, accountability, and sustainable pace.

Business & cross-functional partnership

• Partner with Product Management, warehouse operations leadership, and internal business customers — supplying trustworthy feasibility, estimation, and sequencing input they use to shape and prioritize the roadmap.
• Translate operational goals into technical execution and surface technical realities (cost, risk, trade-offs) back to the business in terms they can act on.
• Partner closely with the Robotics Automation Engineering team to align on the software-hardware interface: keeping WMS and inventory services reliable and evolvable as the automation systems on the warehouse floor change and scale.
• Collaborate with the eCommerce engineering team on shared domain data — inventory availability, order status, fulfillment state — ensuring consistency across systems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building software, including 3+ years at a senior level as an individual contributor — enough technical depth to comfortably coach engineers up to the senior level. (You won't need to out-engineer the Principals; you'll partner with them.)
• 3–5+ years managing and growing software engineering teams; demonstrated ability to lead engineers more technically expert than yourself.
• Strong operations or logistics domain experience — building and operating internal systems in areas such as warehouse management, ERP, inventory, order management, fulfillment, or customer service tooling.
• A track record of decomposing large, ambiguous programs and delivering them predictably and incrementally against a roadmap.
• Experience estimating and forecasting work with ranges and real delivery data — and the judgment to know which metrics help a team improve and which just get gamed.
• Hands-on fluency with generative-AI tooling for software development, and experience starting to enable a team in its responsible use.
• Experience operating live, business-critical systems — on-call, incident response, postmortems — in partnership with a platform/DevOps function.
• Strong knowledge of software architecture, modern design patterns, API design, distributed systems, and secure development practices.
• Strong backend and integration depth — data-intensive services, relational and non-relational databases, event-driven architectures, and service integrations across operational domains. The technology stack is primarily PHP/Laravel and MySQL; depth in a comparable backend stack translates well.
• Excellent communication and collaboration across technical and non-technical stakeholders, including operational and business teams who are the primary users of your systems.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related discipline, or equivalent work experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with WMS platforms, ERP systems, or purpose-built logistics/fulfillment software.
• Familiarity with hardware-software integration in warehouse or manufacturing environments (robotics, conveyor systems, scan-based workflows, or similar).
• Familiarity with AWS and with security practices like OWASP.