Sr. Engineering Manager

Senior Engineering Manager

Remote, New Zealand based · Telecoms · Works with global product & engineering teams

Alianza is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team of around 6 to 7 senior engineers, mostly New Zealand based with a few further afield, within a fully global engineering organisation. First and foremost, this is a people-leadership role. Your main job is to lead and develop a capable, motivated team, and much of your impact comes through them. Beyond the team, you'll bring technical leadership and own project and product delivery.

The team works across a set of carrier-grade voice and communications products that are live with service providers today. The work is a mix of project delivery and the ongoing engineering that keeps those products stable, performant, and secure, from complex defect fixes and regular releases to responding when critical, customer-affecting issues are escalated. A big part of the role is balancing planned work against the unplanned and deciding with Product Management what the team takes on next.

This is a fully remote role based in New Zealand, and we aim to bring the NZ team together in person once a year. As a global organisation, staying in sync across time zones means some flexibility with your hours, including a few calls outside the usual nine-to-five. We use AI tools widely and encourage it; prior experience isn't required, but you'll need to be open to working this way.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and develop the team: regular one-to-ones, honest feedback, and support for each person's growth, while giving them the autonomy to own their work.
• Plan and run delivery: set priorities, manage release cycles and dependencies, keep work predictable, and keep stakeholders clear on progress, risks, and trade-offs.
• Own the backlog with Product Management: balance project work against defects, stability, tech debt, and support so effort stays on what matters most.
• Own critical support issues to resolution: work within the escalation path on customer-affecting problems, get to the root cause, and make sure required fixes and follow-ups get delivered.
• Own technical direction for the team's products: build strong knowledge of the products and domain, and use it to shape the roadmap and technical decisions with Product and Engineering.

What You'll Need

• 6+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years managing engineering teams and a track record of delivering with little oversight.
• A technical degree (CS or STEM preferred) or equivalent experience.
• Broad technical skills and strong judgement in a complex domain, able to support the team across most challenges and bring clarity to ambiguous problems and high-pressure incidents.
• Experience running both planned delivery and reactive support and prioritising well when they compete for the same people.
• Clear communication and strong cross-functional relationships, partnering with Product Management and Technical Leads and coordinating across time zones.
• Telecoms or a similarly complex domain, including familiarity with SIP/VoIP and carrier-grade fundamentals, is a plus but not required.

If this role excites you but you don't tick every box, please apply anyway. Research shows that women and some underrepresented groups tend to hold back unless they meet every requirement, and we'd still love to hear from you.