Senior Engineering Manager

About this role

Riva is seeking a strategic and people-focused Senior Engineering Manager to lead and elevate our globally distributed engineering teams. In this role, you’ll champion technical excellence, build resilient SaaS architectures, and nurture a high-performing, inclusive team culture. You’ll play a critical role in shaping our product delivery, engineering practices, and team success.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will build and support a globally distributed, innovative, and successful engineering team. Your mission will be to drive best-in-class software development practices, deliver reliable and scalable SaaS solutions, and create a collaborative, transparent, and innovative engineering culture.

More specifically, your responsibilities include:

• Lead and structure globally distributed engineering teams to deliver against company goals.

• Provide direct management to Engineering Managers, Team Leads, and Testing Leads; conduct regular 1:1s and skip-levels.

• Oversee performance management, goal setting, development planning, and annual compensation decisions.

• Ensure delivery of scalable, high-quality features aligned with product and business priorities.

• Foster an inclusive, supportive team culture rooted in psychological safety and technical excellence.

• Partner with the Product team to ensure effective staff allocation and strategic execution.

• Drive engineering roadmap planning and contribute to business goal achievement.

• Define and track engineering KPIs (e.g., DORA metrics, quality metrics, velocity).

• Oversee recruitment strategies and lead hiring initiatives in collaboration with HR.

• Manage engineering budgets and drive SaaS cost optimization through efficient architecture and operations.

• Champion engineering best practices and continuous improvement across SDLC processes.

• Lead innovation projects and cross-team technical initiatives that move the business forward.

• Ensure compliance with data security and privacy standards (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR).

WHO ARE YOU

You’re a highly skilled technical leader with deep SaaS experience and a passion for growing and enabling high-performing teams. You value autonomy, transparency, and collaboration. You love solving complex engineering challenges while investing in people, culture, and scalable practices.

More specifically, you bring:

• Proven experience managing product engineering teams in cloud-native SaaS environments

• Track record of building and scaling high-performing engineering organizations

• Expertise in performance management, coaching, and career development

• Strong leadership in remote-first and globally distributed team environments

• Experience partnering with cross-functional teams including Product, HR, and Business Operations

• Deep understanding of Agile practices and modern SDLC

• Strong budget management and business acumen

• Excellent communication, strategic thinking, and problem-solving skills

Hard Skills & Technical Expertise

• Strong knowledge of SaaS architecture, including multi-tenancy, scalability, and uptime strategies

• Deep experience designing and operating distributed backend systems, including concurrency, retries, idempotency, fault tolerance, and eventual consistency.

• Strong proficiency with C#/.NET backend architecture, including modern .NET, asynchronous programming, dependency injection, testing, and performance optimization.

• Experience designing background processing and job orchestration systems, including scheduling, queues, worker patterns, retries, backoff, and dead-letter handling.

• Serverless architecture and microservices development

• CI/CD pipelines and quality automation frameworks

• Observability and incident response practices (monitoring, logging, tracing with tools like CloudWatch, Splunk)

• Modern API design (REST, GraphQL, API Gateway patterns)

• Secure development practices, including IAM policies, authentication, and authorization

• Familiarity with compliance and security frameworks (SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA is a bonus)

• FinOps principles and experience optimizing cloud infrastructure cost

BONUS POINTS FOR:

• Deep experience with AWS core services (IAM, EC2, VPC, ECS, EKS, Lambda, RDS, CloudWatch, etc.)

• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation)

• Containerization and orchestration expertise (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS)

• Experience managing through rapid scale or post-product-market fit growth

• Background in data engineering, ML/AI infrastructure, or DevOps tooling

• Experience working with Salesforce, Outlook/Exchange, or CRM integration platforms

• Experience leading strategic engineering initiatives across multiple teams

CORE COMPETENCIES FOR SUCCESS

• Integrity & Accountability: Acts with honesty and responsibility, takes ownership of actions and decisions, and raises risks or concerns early.

• Collaboration: Embraces diverse perspectives and works effectively with Engineering, Product, Quality Assurance, and leadership to achieve shared goals.

• Continuous Learning: Consistently seeks opportunities to expand technical, leadership, and AI capabilities.

• Design Thinking: Uses creativity, emerging technologies, and customer-centered approaches to solve complex problems.

• Analytical Thinking & Decision Making: Evaluates information, risks, and tradeoffs to make clear and well-reasoned decisions.

• Managing Resources & Digital Dexterity: Adapts to new technologies while effectively managing time, priorities, and team capacity.

• Operational Alignment & Coordination: Ensures engineering activities are coordinated, efficient, and aligned with product and organizational objectives.

• Talent Management & Development: Develops team members through coaching, feedback, mentorship, and meaningful growth opportunities.

• Innovation: Encourages experimentation and creates an environment where new ideas and approaches can be explored responsibly.

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