Engineering Manager (Breakthrough)

Engineering Manager

As an Engineering Manager at Breakthrough, you will lead a team of engineers building the technology and data platforms that help the world's leading shippers reduce transportation costs, build more efficient networks, and decarbonize their supply chains. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you'll stay close to the work reviewing code and designs, coaching engineers, and helping shape technical direction while owning the delivery, reliability, and security of everything your team builds and runs. You'll also partner with stakeholders throughout the organization to help drive the priorities and direction of our products and solutions, ensuring engineering effort is focused on the highest-impact outcomes. The ideal location for this role is on-site in Green Bay, WI, however, based on relevancy of experience, we are open to considering candidates within a drivable distance from Green Bay; some travel to Green Bay would be required.

Job Responsibilities

Team Leadership

• Lead and inspire a team of engineers, fostering a positive and collaborative work environment.
• Mentor and develop team members, encouraging continuous learning and professional growth.
• Cultivate a culture of accountability, innovation, and excellence within the engineering team that embodies Breakthrough's values.
• Provide ongoing support and feedback utilizing in-the-moment coaching in addition to annual evaluations, goal setting, and professional development plans.

Talent & Hiring

• Own hiring and team composition recruit, interview, and build a high-performing engineering team.
• Assess the capabilities of engineers on the team and create the conditions for them to grow and do their best work.

Execution Leadership

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define product scope, objectives, and requirements.
• Ensure timely and cost-effective product development.
• Maintain a clear understanding and management of timelines, scope, and budget.
• Ensure your team delivers extraordinary output, and continuously seeks ways to make an impact.
• Contribute to the development of a comprehensive engineering roadmap, outlining key milestones and initiatives.

Technical Excellence

• Contribute to the technical vision and strategy of Breakthrough.
• Maintain hands-on technical involvement by participating in code and design reviews, providing direct technical guidance, and staying close enough to the work to assess quality and gauge the capabilities of the engineers on the team.
• Guide architecture and technical design decisions, set and uphold engineering standards, and ensure the team builds scalable, maintainable, secure software.
• Champion improvements to DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and engineering tooling to increase delivery speed, reliability, and quality.
• Stay current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices.
• Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success and efficiency of engineering projects.

System Ownership

• Hold responsibility for the systems owned by the engineering team.
• Uphold the stability, scalability, and security of the systems under your purview.
• Assist the team in monitoring and supporting all areas of the system to ensure reliability meets business and technical service agreements.
• Ensure appropriate on-call and incident-response coverage, and drive post-incident learning and continuous improvement.

Communication and Collaboration

• Foster effective communication within the engineering team and across other departments.
• Regularly update Breakthrough's leadership on product and system status, risks, and opportunities.

Additional Job Responsibilities

• Cultivate Breakthrough's values while inspiring, empowering, recognizing, and guiding team members.
• Live our values of High Performance, Caring Relationships, Strategic Foresight, and Entrepreneurial Spirit.
• Find A Better Way by championing continuous improvement and quality control efforts to identify opportunities to innovate and improve efficiency, accuracy, and standardization.
• Continuously learn and develop self professionally.
• Support corporate efforts for safety, government compliance, and all other company policies & procedures.
• Perform other related duties as required and assigned.

Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or other highly technical scientific discipline, or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• 2+ years leading or managing engineers, or equivalent tech-lead experience.
• Strong, hands-on technical background with the ability to read and review code, participate in pull requests, evaluate technical designs, and understand what the team is building well enough to coach engineers and assess their abilities.
• Hands-on experience across a modern technology stack such as Python, SQL, and JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, React).
• Working knowledge of application architectures, security best practices, and data integration concepts.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and a thoughtful view on integrating them into engineering workflows.
• Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills, with a proactive approach to identifying issues, performance bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement.
• Excellent communication skills, with a track record of partnering across product, business, and other engineering teams to align on priorities.
• Ability to work both at the strategic level and at the tactical level, holding others accountable while building team rapport and engagement.
• Experience with software development methodologies including Agile, Kanban, and Scrum.
• Ability to mentor and guide team members to maximize their impact.

Preferred:

• Experience improving DevOps processes, CI/CD pipelines, and engineering tooling.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems concepts, including scalability, fault tolerance, and performance trade-offs.
• Experience building and leading large-scale or high-performance systems and teams.
• Prior experience in a product-focused technology team.
• Passion for mentoring engineers and helping others achieve their career goals.
• Experience with remote and distributed teams.