Software Development Manager

Job Description

Job Description

ABOUT US

Card Kingdom has served Magic: The Gathering players across the world for over 20 years. We are a trusted source for buying and selling Magic: The Gathering singles, packs, and booster boxes from throughout the game's history. Our love of the community and game shines through everything we do. We are a customer-centric, data-driven, innovative workplace. We value our team and recognize that every role in our organization is behind delivering our renowned customer experience.

In addition to our eCommerce business, Card Kingdom owns and operates the award-winning game store and restaurant, Mox Boarding House. With unique locations in Seattle, Bellevue, Portland, and Chandler, we deliver an elevated experience to local gaming communities.

Our Mission: We use tabletop gaming as a campfire – a place to gather, share and celebrate –for the sake of cultivating deeper relationships with our customers, amongst ourselves, with our communities, and the world.

Our Benefits: Excellent benefits, generous PTO, and flexible scheduling, remote work opportunities, paid parental leave, safe harbor 401k match, paid holidays and employee discounts. We are a family friendly culture that supports work life balance.

Role:

We're looking for a Software Development Manager to lead our eCommerce engineering team — the team behind cardkingdom.com. You'll own the customer-facing storefront end to end: catalog, search, cart, checkout, account management, and the buying and selling experiences that serve Magic players worldwide. You'll build great teams and great software: a player/coach who is equal parts hands-on technologist, delivery leader, and people manager.

Your team is full-stack with a front-end heart. We run PHP/Laravel services over MySQL and Elasticsearch, behind modern JavaScript/TypeScript front-ends — and we care deeply about polished, responsive, accessible experiences that perform on every device. Site speed, SEO, and a frictionless path from search to checkout are business outcomes here, not afterthoughts: when cardkingdom.com is fast and reliable, the business grows.

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 our 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.

You don't need to play Magic: The Gathering to thrive here. But if you've ever sleeved a deck, chased down the last card for a Commander build, or just love serving a passionate community of enthusiasts — you'll feel right at home.

Key Responsibilities:

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 our technical direction.
• Steward our 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 the customer experience — performance, responsiveness, accessibility (WCAG), and SEO — and coach engineers to build to it.
• Raise your team's effective, responsible use of generative-AI tooling for software development, within our approved tools and policies — and help mature those standards as they evolve.

Operational ownership

• Own the operational health of cardkingdom.com's live systems under a "you build it, you run it" model — your team operates what it builds, in partnership with our 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 our 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 the storefront, downtime and slow pages are lost revenue — 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 our 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 our 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, design, and internal business customers — supplying trustworthy feasibility, estimation, and sequencing input they use to shape and prioritize the roadmap, and helping shape "the art of the possible" for the customer experience.
• Translate business goals into technical execution and surface technical realities (cost, risk, trade-offs) back to the business in terms they can act on.
• Collaborate with peer engineering teams — including our Back-of-House (warehouse, ERP, and customer service systems) and Robotics Automation teams — to align on shared systems and dependencies like inventory, orders, and fulfillment.

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 our 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 e-commerce domain experience — building and operating customer-facing commerce services such as catalog, search, cart, checkout, account management, inventory, and shipping.
• 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 knowledge of modern web technologies. Our stack is PHP/Laravel, MySQL, NGINX, and Elasticsearch behind modern JavaScript/TypeScript front-ends — depth in a comparable stack translates well.
• Enough front-end fluency to hold a high bar for responsive, performant, accessible (WCAG), SEO-friendly experiences — comfortable in the world of modern front-end frameworks, component-driven development, and design-system thinking.
• Excellent communication and collaboration across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related discipline, or equivalent work experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with search/discovery, personalization, or recommendation systems at e-commerce scale.
• Familiarity with AWS and with security practices like OWASP

Location / Work Schedule

• Primary: Seattle (Ballard)
• Secondary: Monroe
• Hybrid

Job Type / Salary

• Full Time
• Exempt/Salary: Range from $185,000 - $210,000 depending on qualifications and experience

Benefits:

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

Equal Opportunity Employment:

We are committed to cultivating a workplace in which diverse perspectives and experiences are welcomed and respected. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, ancestry, national origin, sex, age, disability (physical or mental), marital or veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, political ideology, or membership in any other legally protected class.