Development Manager

Summary

The Development Manager reports into the Chief Technology Officer and owns the engineering capacity, delivery commitments, and technical execution quality across Aquifer's development pods. Directly manages all engineers, including the pod tech leads and a technical architect, with full people-management responsibility. The Development Manager owns release reliability and the delivery/quality dimensions of engineering performance. 

Responsibilities:

• Ensure engineering executes the cadence necessary to deliver on roadmap commitments set by the Lead Product Manager.

• Own engineering scorecard metrics for quality and delivery.

• Directly manage all engineers, including both pod tech leads: performance, career development, hiring, day-to-day support.

• Provide meaningful roles and assignments for engineers through talent and capability mapping.

• Own engineering capacity planning, translating roadmap commitments into realistic delivery plans.

• Own release reliability and production quality across both pods.

• Participate in engineering planning at every cadence.

• Lead the effort with the Technical Architect to adopt AI development best practices to increase velocity and quality. 

• Support and grow the existing Rails-based product with attention to technical sustainability and delivery cost.

• Partner with the Lead Product Manager and both tech leads on cross-functional delivery planning.

Qualifications

• Proven experience managing engineering teams, engineering managers, or senior individual contributors — ideally in a Ruby on Rails environment.

• Track record of owning delivery commitments and release quality for a live SaaS product.

• Experience managing distributed or multi-site engineering teams.

• Demonstrated ability to evaluate the technical judgment and output of senior or staff-level engineers.

• Comfortable setting and enforcing technical and process guardrails for AI-assisted software development.

• Experience running structured capability assessments (e.g., evaluating a technical architect against defined deliverables) is a plus.

• Working familiarity with Jira/Confluence.