| Detail | For this role |
|---|---|
| Department | Information Technology |
| Level | Manager |
| Reports to | Director of Engineering |
| Direct reports | Senior Software Engineer, Software Engineer, Technical Lead, QA Engineer |
| Experience | 8 to 12 years in software development, with 2 or more years leading engineers |
Engineering Manager job description template
Copy this job description, replace the text in square brackets and post it on your careers page or a job portal.
Job title: Engineering Manager
Department: Information Technology
Reports to: Director of Engineering
Location: [City], [office, branch or site]
About the role
An Engineering Manager leads one software team, typically six to ten engineers, and is responsible for both the people and what the team ships. They run sprint planning and delivery, hire and grow engineers, hold regular one-on-ones, handle performance issues and keep the team's services healthy in production. In Indian product companies and startups the role reports to a director or head of engineering. A good Engineering Manager delivers predictably, keeps good engineers from leaving and understands the code well enough to judge technical trade-offs.
Key responsibilities
- Plan each sprint with the product manager, balancing roadmap features, bugs, tech debt and on-call load.
- Follow sprint progress daily, remove blockers and cut scope early when estimates prove wrong.
- Hold fortnightly one-on-ones with every engineer covering work, growth, feedback and concerns.
- Hire for the team: write the job description, run interview loops and make the hiring recommendation.
- Onboard new joiners with a buddy, a starter task and a 30, 60 and 90 day plan.
- Review designs and important pull requests to keep quality high, while leaving implementation to the engineers.
- Own the team's services in production, including the on-call rota, alert quality and follow-through on incident actions.
- Write performance reviews with specific feedback, and run an improvement plan when an engineer is struggling.
- Agree dependencies, API contracts and release timing with other teams.
- Report team delivery, quality and hiring status to the director every week.
Requirements
- Engineering degree in Computer Science or IT, or an MCA
- A management or leadership course is an advantage
- 8 to 12 years in software development, with 2 or more years leading engineers
KRAs and KPIs for a Engineering Manager
Key result areas for the appraisal form, each with a KPI you can measure every month or quarter.
| Key result area | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| Sprint delivery | At least 85 percent of committed sprint stories completed across each quarter |
| Production quality | No more than one severity 1 incident per quarter from the team's services |
| Team retention | No regretted attrition in the year, with a growth plan in place for every engineer |
| Hiring | Open positions filled within 60 days, with new joiners shipping code in their first 2 weeks |
| One-on-ones | Fortnightly one-on-ones held with every direct report, with fewer than 1 in 10 cancelled |
| Technical health | At least 15 percent of sprint capacity spent on tech debt and reliability each quarter |
Skills and tools
Tools used day to day: Jira, GitHub or GitLab, Confluence, Slack or Microsoft Teams, Datadog or Grafana, Google Sheets for capacity planning.
Reporting line and career path
Next roles: Director of Engineering, Head of Engineering, Delivery Manager
Interview questions for a Engineering Manager
- One of your engineers has missed deadlines for two sprints. How do you handle it?
- Tell me about someone you hired who did not work out. What did you learn?
- How do you decide how much of a sprint goes to tech debt?
- Your strongest engineer says they are bored. What do you do?
- How do you estimate a feature nobody on the team has built before?
- Describe an incident your team caused. How did you handle it with the team and with leadership?
- How much code do you still write, and why?
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What does an engineering manager do?
An engineering manager leads a software team and is responsible for its people and its delivery. They plan sprints, remove blockers, hire engineers, hold one-on-ones, write performance reviews, look after the team's production services and coordinate with other teams. They review designs and code but usually leave most of the coding to the engineers.
What is the difference between an engineering manager and a tech lead?
A tech lead guides a team's technical work: design, code quality and technical decisions, while still coding most of the day. An engineering manager is responsible for the people: hiring, growth, performance and delivery. In smaller companies one person may do both, but they are different jobs measured in different ways.
How many engineers does an engineering manager manage?
A typical engineering manager looks after five to ten engineers. With fewer than five, the manager usually doubles as the tech lead. Beyond ten or twelve, regular one-on-ones and real coaching become hard to sustain, and that is often the point where a team is split in two.