Manager, Software Development

Software Development Manager

Job Location (Short): Atlanta, Georgia-USA | Hampton, Virginia-USA | Houston, Texas-USA | Madison, Alabama-USA Workplace Type: Hybrid

About Role

The Software Development Manager is responsible for leading and managing the technical, delivery, and people-management activities of multiple software development teams. This role manages and leads developers, ensuring they are enabled, unblocked, and aligned to deliver high-quality enterprise software solutions. The role requires a strong software engineering background, proven experience managing software development teams, solid understanding of Agile delivery practices, and the ability to drive Agile evolution across teams. The Software Development Manager works closely with Product, QA, architects, DevOps, and other engineering managers to plan releases, improve delivery predictability, monitor productivity, and ensure quality outcomes.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Manage and lead developers, technical leads, and other engineering team members.
• Act as the project and delivery manager for assigned software projects and product initiatives.
• Lead the planning, execution, monitoring, and control of work assigned to the software development teams.
• Ensure teams are enabled, unblocked, and supported to deliver software effectively and predictably.
• Drive Agile evolution and continuous improvement across teams, including Scrum practices, delivery cadence, backlog readiness, sprint execution, retrospectives, and cross-team coordination.
• Work closely with Product on release planning, backlog prioritization, delivery sequencing, scope alignment, and dependency management.
• Coordinate with Product to ensure requirements are clear, refined, estimated, and ready for development.
• Manage team capacity, resource allocation, workload balance, and skill utilization.
• Efficiently and effectively manage the division's resources, including human skills, software tools, and information technology.
• Receive assignments in the form of objectives and translate them into actionable team plans, priorities, milestones, and deliverables.
• Determine and coordinate the assignments of subordinate team members and provide technical and administrative assistance as needed.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance for enterprise software development initiatives.
• Support high-level design of enterprise system architecture, including scalable, maintainable, secure, and reliable software solutions.
• Support software design approaches for multi-tenant systems, microservices, and cloud-hosted enterprise applications.
• Act as a sponsor for Quality of Service for assigned software projects, including performance, reliability, scalability, availability, maintainability, and operational readiness.
• Work with QA Managers and QA Directors to define, identify, monitor, and address software quality issues, defects, and quality trends.
• Review quality metrics and collaborate with QA leadership to improve test coverage, defect prevention, automation, and release readiness.
• Monitor team productivity and delivery metrics, such as velocity, throughput, predictability, cycle time, defect trends, escaped defects, and sprint goal achievement.
• Identify delivery risks, technical risks, quality risks, and team blockers, and take corrective action where needed.
• Frequently interact with other managers to coordinate team assignments, dependencies, shared priorities, and related activities.
• Support engineering best practices, including code quality, peer reviews, CI/CD, automated testing, secure development, documentation, and operational support readiness.
• Coach, mentor, and develop team members to improve technical capability, accountability, collaboration, and delivery performance.
• Promote a culture of ownership, transparency, continuous improvement, engineering excellence, and customer-focused delivery.

AI Enablement Responsibilities

Enable developers with AI-assisted tools and practices to improve productivity, software delivery efficiency, code quality, documentation, testing, and engineering workflows. Promote responsible and effective use of AI tools across development teams, while aligning with company standards, security requirements, and software engineering best practices. Identify opportunities to use AI to reduce repetitive engineering tasks, improve developer experience, accelerate troubleshooting, support knowledge sharing, and improve delivery outcomes. Support teams in adopting AI tools that help them become more productive, not limited to building AI-enabled product features.

Required Skills & Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field. Proven experience in software engineering and enterprise software development. 7+ years of experience managing software development teams, including direct people management and delivery ownership. Experience managing multiple teams, preferably two or more teams in parallel. Strong understanding of Agile software delivery, Scrum practices, release planning, sprint planning, backlog refinement, and continuous improvement. Experience working with Product Managers and Product Owners to plan releases, manage priorities, and enable delivery. Experience managing software delivery metrics, team productivity indicators, quality trends, and delivery performance. Strong technical understanding of enterprise application architecture and modern software engineering practices. Experience coordinating with QA leadership on quality planning, quality trends, defect management, and release readiness. Strong communication, stakeholder management, planning, and problem-solving skills.

Preferred Technical Experience

Backend: Java Enterprise and Spring Boot. Cloud Hosting: AWS. Frontend: Angular and/or React. Database: MySQL. Architecture: Multi-tenant systems, microservices, enterprise system design, and scalable distributed systems. Engineering Practices: CI/CD, automated testing, code quality practices, API design, observability, and secure software development. AI Enablement: Experience introducing, enabling, or supporting AI-assisted software development tools and practices that improve engineering team productivity. Familiarity with building AI-enabled product features is a plus.

Required Skills and Competencies

Leadership of multiple Scrum teams. Agile delivery leadership and Agile transformation/evolution. Software engineering management. Enterprise system architecture understanding. Resource planning and capacity management. Release planning and delivery coordination. Stakeholder management across Product, QA, Engineering, and Operations. Quality ownership and defect trend analysis. Team productivity monitoring and performance improvement. Risk, dependency, and blocker management. Coaching, mentoring, and people development. Strong decision-making and accountability. Communication across technical and non-technical audiences.

Key Performance Indicators

Delivery of assigned software projects and releases against agreed scope, timeline, quality, and business priorities. Effectiveness of managing and enabling developers. Improvement in Agile maturity, delivery predictability, and team execution. Team productivity metrics, including velocity trends, throughput, sprint predictability, and cycle time. Software quality metrics, including defect trends, escaped defects, test coverage, and release readiness. Effectiveness of collaboration with Product Managers, Product Owners, QA Managers, QA Directors, and other engineering leaders. Reduction of blockers, dependencies, and delivery risks. Quality of technical execution and alignment with architecture, microservices, cloud, and multi-tenant design principles. Team engagement, retention, capability development, and performance.

About Octave

Octave provides mission-critical software that empowers organizations to make informed decisions across every stage of the asset lifecycle - Design, Build, Operate and Protect - where performance, safety, and reliability are non-negotiable and failure is not an option. Turning complex operational data into actionable intelligence, Octave connects expertise, real-world conditions and enterprise-scale insight to improve performance, resilience and incident response where it matters most. Octave has more than 7,000 employees in 45 countries.

Why Work for Octave?

All in. Always forward. That's the way we do things around here. We put trust in our people because we believe it's the best way to unleash potential, bring ideas to life, and keep moving ahead. And it's why we're committed to creating an environment that's truly supportive, providing you with the resources you need to support your ambitions, no matter who you are or where you are in the world. Everyone is welcome At Octave, we believe that diverse and inclusive teams are critical to the success of our people and our business. Here, everyone is welcome. As an inclusive workplace, we don't discriminate. In fact, we embrace differences and are fully committed to creating equal opportunities, an inclusive environment, and fairness for all. Respect is the cornerstone of how we operate, so speak up and be yourself. You're valued here.