Software Engineering Manager, Research

Job Summary

NYPL is hiring a Software Engineering Manager to help lead our research teams in developing our suite of discovery and access tools. These include the Research Catalog, which provides access to over 20 million volumes, and Digital Collections, which provides access to over a million digitized assets, as well as other tools that provide access to NYPL’s extensive archives and special collections. These patron-facing applications are backed by a set of data pipelines and APIs that support discovery and ensure that patrons can request materials, make research appointments and order high-resolution scans, among other options. This role will ensure that these systems are maintained while helping lead strategic work that will help NYPL build a unified experience for our research patrons, ensuring that they have easy access to the incredible wealth of NYPL’s collections.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the day‑to‑day development work and priorities for the Research engineering teams.
• Manage strategic priorities and projects for the Research teams, including new feature development and the shipping of new products.
• Develop overall roadmaps for the Research teams, ensuring capacity for product work as well as routine maintenance and technical debt.
• Leverage a broad base of technical knowledge to identify solutions for difficult problems in our Research products.
• Build and maintain relationships between the Research engineering teams and internal Product/Project teams as well as stakeholders across NYPL.
• Support and mentor Research engineers, helping them deliver results on time and in accordance with department standards.
• Present and communicate the team’s work to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Build support for Research’s work among interested parties across NYPL.
• Align development approaches between engineering teams, sharing best practices.
• Identify hidden connections between our collections and design ways to surface them.
• Retire legacy applications and replace them with modern, streamlined solutions.
• Manage the work and output of 6-8 engineers across NYPL’s Research teams, communicating priorities and system requirements clearly.
• Collaborate with the Research teams to build innovative and forward‑looking applications for our patrons and staff.
• Work with product and project leadership to estimate the feasibility and complexity of new products and features.
• Hire, mentor, and coach engineers on best practices and career growth.
• Foster a psychologically safe team environment, being transparent about challenges, failures, and successes, and encouraging staff to ask questions, voice concerns, and engage critically with the work.
• Research and recommend solutions driven by data and cost‑benefit analysis, with an emphasis on automation and efficiency.
• Encourage and enable engineers to adopt AI coding tools and agentic workflows where they improve quality, velocity, or developer experience, while maintaining strong code review, testing, and security practices.

Learning and Growth

• Gain an understanding of library science practices, especially around metadata standards and practices used in NYPL’s Research systems.
• Investigate the connections between NYPL’s different research tools to learn how records and metadata can be shared and connected between them.
• Collaborate with Engineering leadership to help improve NYPL Digital’s culture and implement best practices in software development.

Responsibilities of the 1/3 year, 6‑month milestones (optional timeline)

• Within 1 month: Build an understanding of NYPL’s Research products and architecture; meet with engineering team members and key stakeholders to understand current workstreams and strategic priorities; review current development practices and workflows; collaborate with other engineering leaders on organizational priorities.
• Within 3 months: Understand the teams’ codebases, status, and development needs; build a picture of team member status and annual goals; participate in design and priority discussions with product and project management; lead conversations about development progress and report status to Digital leadership.
• Within 6 months and beyond: Provide mentorship to engineering team members on project and career goals; influence design and architecture discussions for Research products; collaborate with leadership to deliver new features and facilitate adoption of best‑practice development; take overall responsibility for new engineering projects; help lead product development by ensuring delivery, mentoring, fostering collaboration, and promoting best‑practice adoption; empower the team to build useful, accessible applications in a sustainable and maintainable way.

Required Education and Certifications

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent.

Required Experience

• 7–10+ years of hands‑on development experience on a relevant tech stack.
• 3–5+ years of experience managing one or more engineering teams.

Required Skills

• Strong leadership, mentoring, coaching, and decision‑making skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrated ability to level up individual engineers and engineering teams.
• Hands‑on familiarity with modern AI coding assistants and agentic development tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor or comparable) and a viewpoint on where they help and where they don’t.
• Track record of leading major technical initiatives to solve complex technical problems.
• Knowledge of non‑technical strategies for solving team, culture and process problems.
• Experience establishing documentation standards and practices.
• Expertise in Python application development and system design, including production experience with Python web frameworks.
• Expertise in data pipeline architecture, data stores, queue processing and other tools.
• Strong understanding of system architecture, design patterns and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, etc).
• Strong understanding of DevOps practices and their impact on technical delivery.
• Strong problem‑solving skills and the ability to navigate through ambiguity and drive results.

Managerial/Supervisory Responsibilities

• Support a team of 6–8 engineers in their day‑to‑day work.
• Coach team members on hard and soft skills.
• Provide feedback on team performance and motivate the team to deliver on project goals.
• Keep the team accountable and ensure delivery.

NYPL Core Values

• Be Helpful to patrons and colleagues.
• Be Resourceful in solving problems.
• Be Curious in all aspects of your work.
• Be Welcoming and Inclusive.

Work Environment

• Office setting.
• Hybrid work schedule; required three days per week in office in NYC.

Physical Duties

• Limited physical effort required.
• May require travel within NYC.

Schedule

• Monday‑Friday, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
• Hybrid work schedule; required three days per week in office in NYC.

The New York Public Library Salary Statement

At the Library, we believe that pay transparency and pay equity are important to ensuring we source the best candidates and keep the best employees. When making a determination as to the appropriate salary for a candidate, we consider a variety of factors such as the position requirements, the skills, prior experience, and educational background required or preferred for the job, the scope and impact of the role within the organization, internal peer equity, and the candidate’s specific training, experience, education level, and skills. No single factor is conclusive; the Library reserves the right to consider any and all relevant factors and make a decision consistent with its policies.

Union salaries are determined by collective bargaining agreement(s).