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 our eCommerce engineering team and own the customer-facing storefront end to end, including catalog, search, cart, checkout, account management, and buying and selling experiences. You'll build great teams and great software as a player/coach who combines technical depth, delivery leadership, and people management.

Your team is full-stack with a front-end heart. Our platform includes PHP/Laravel services, MySQL, and Elasticsearch, supported by modern JavaScript/TypeScript front ends. We care deeply about polished, responsive, accessible experiences that perform across every device. Site speed, SEO, and a frictionless path from search to checkout are business outcomes, not afterthoughts.

You'll stay close to the work by reviewing designs, pairing on complex problems, investigating production issues, and occasionally writing code — always with the goal of teaching and raising the bar. You'll partner closely with Principal Engineers, who establish technical direction, while ensuring consistency and alignment across the team's solutions.

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

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Stewardship

• Bring senior-level engineering depth to evaluate designs, challenge architecture, and ensure sound technical decisions while partnering with Principal Engineers on technical direction.
• Establish consistent engineering patterns, conventions, and practices across your team, including contractors and vendors.
• Maintain a high bar for customer experience, including performance, responsiveness, accessibility (WCAG), and SEO.
• Champion the effective and responsible use of approved generative AI tools for software development and help evolve team standards as those tools mature.

Operational Ownership

• Own the operational health of live, business-critical systems through a "you build it, you run it" model, in partnership with DevOps.
• Establish on-call practices, ensure the team can effectively support what it builds, and lead incident response and blameless postmortems.
• Balance reliability and operational demands with feature delivery, recognizing that downtime and poor performance directly impact the business.

Delivery & Predictable Execution

• Provide leadership with honest, range-based estimates and refine forecasts using real delivery data.
• Break large, ambiguous initiatives — including multi-year programs — into incrementally shippable capabilities with clear milestones and acceptance criteria.
• Build a culture of accountability where engineers estimate under uncertainty, own commitments, and follow through.
• Work within quarterly planning, long-term roadmap, and Scrum processes while surfacing risks and slippage early and re-planning transparently.

People Leadership & Talent

• Coach and mentor engineers across the career ladder, creating clear and actionable growth paths.
• Lead and develop senior technical talent with the maturity to support their growth and advocacy while respecting their technical expertise.
• Own hiring, onboarding, feedback, performance management, and compensation decisions in partnership with the VP of Engineering.
• Lead contractors and vendors to the same standards of quality, accountability, and sustainable execution as internal team members.

Business & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with Product, Design, and business stakeholders to provide reliable feasibility, estimation, sequencing, and technical input into the roadmap.
• Translate business goals into technical execution while clearly communicating cost, risk, and trade-offs.
• Collaborate with peer engineering teams across warehouse, ERP, customer service, robotics, inventory, orders, and fulfillment systems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building software, including 3+ years at a senior individual-contributor level, with the technical depth to coach engineers through the senior level.
• 3–5+ years managing and developing software engineering teams, including the ability to lead engineers with greater technical specialization.
• Strong eCommerce experience building and operating customer-facing systems such as catalog, search, cart, checkout, accounts, inventory, and fulfillment.
• Demonstrated success breaking down large, ambiguous programs and delivering them predictably against a roadmap.
• Experience estimating and forecasting work using ranges, assumptions, and real delivery data.
• Hands-on experience with generative AI tools for software development and enabling teams to use them responsibly.
• Experience operating business-critical production systems, including on-call, incident response, and postmortems, in partnership with DevOps or platform teams.
• Strong knowledge of software architecture, modern design patterns, API design, distributed systems, and secure development practices.
• Strong knowledge of modern web technologies. Our stack includes PHP/Laravel, MySQL, NGINX, Elasticsearch, and modern JavaScript/TypeScript front ends; comparable experience translates well.
• Enough front-end fluency to maintain a high bar for responsive, performant, accessible, and SEO-friendly experiences.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience with search, discovery, personalization, or recommendation systems at eCommerce scale.
• Familiarity with AWS and application security practices such as OWASP.

Salary

• Full-time position
• $190,000–$210,000, depending on qualifications and experience

Benefits

• Paid Time Off: 6 weeks accrued per year, plus 8 company holidays
• Health Benefits: Zero-cost premium options for medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Retirement: 401(k) with a 4% Safe Harbor match and no vesting period
• Flexible Spending Accounts & Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-Tax Commuter Benefits
• Supplemental Life & AD&D Insurance
• Accident, Critical Illness & Hospital Confinement Plans
• Employee Assistance Program
• Employee Discount