Senior Software Engineering Manager

Location: Vancouver, BC, 100% on-site Employment Type: Full-time Experience Level: Senior, 8+ years in engineering, 4+ years in management Company Punt is a Vancouver-based, founder-led technology company behind two of the largest social casinos in North America. We’re evolving into a prediction-led super app—integrating prediction markets, social gaming, and new product surfaces into a single, cohesive experience. Our backend already operates at scale, processing high-volume, real-money transactions. We’re building toward a new category: the most advanced and engaging social gaming platform in the world. Role Overview We are seeking a Software Development Manager to lead and scale a high-performing engineering team responsible for building, operating, and evolving core product and platform systems. This is a staff-level engineering management role for someone who can combine strong technical judgment with excellent people leadership, delivery ownership, operational maturity, and cross-functional execution. You will manage engineers, improve team effectiveness, partner closely with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Data, Security, and executive leadership, and ensure the team consistently ships high-quality, reliable, secure, and scalable software. The ideal candidate has a strong engineering background across backend systems, frontend product development, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and production operations. You do not need to be the deepest hands-on expert in every layer, but you must be credible enough to guide technical direction, challenge architectural decisions, raise engineering standards, and coach engineers through complex tradeoffs. This role is for a manager who is still close to the work: someone who understands modern software delivery, uses AI-forward engineering practices, cares deeply about system reliability and product quality, and can build the operating mechanisms required for a fast-growing engineering organization. Responsibilities • Lead, coach, and develop a team of software engineers across backend, frontend, platform, and full-stack work. • Own team delivery, execution quality, engineering health, and operational outcomes for business-critical product and platform initiatives. • Partner with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Data, Security, and company leadership to translate business priorities into clear technical plans, milestones, and delivery commitments. • Establish strong team operating rhythms, including planning, prioritization, estimation, execution tracking, design reviews, code reviews, release readiness, incident follow-up, and continuous improvement. • Raise the engineering bar for architecture, maintainability, observability, test quality, documentation, security, reliability, and production ownership. • Guide technical decision-making across Laravel/PHP backend systems, React/Next.js or comparable frontend surfaces, APIs, data stores, queues, caches, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and production operations. • Ensure the team builds systems that are scalable, secure, performant, maintainable, and operable under real production load. • Improve DevOps and SRE practices, including deployment safety, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, incident response, on-call health, post-incident reviews, and reliability improvements. • Build a strong engineering culture of ownership, pragmatic architecture, high-quality execution, AI-assisted development, operational accountability, and continuous learning. • Mentor engineers through career development, feedback, performance management, technical growth, and leadership opportunities. • Hire, onboard, and retain strong engineering talent, while improving interview loops, calibration, onboarding, and role expectations. • Identify and resolve execution risks, technical risks, delivery bottlenecks, team-health issues, and cross-functional misalignment early. • Act as an escalation point for complex delivery, technical, people, and production issues. • Use data and judgment to improve team performance, including delivery predictability, system reliability, defect rates, incident trends, cycle time, and engineering throughput. • Help mature engineering processes without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. Required Qualifications & Experience • 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience building and operating production systems. • 3–5+ years of engineering management experience, including direct people management, coaching, hiring, performance management, and delivery ownership. • Proven ability to lead a team responsible for complex production systems, preferably in high-traffic, high-concurrency, transactional, gaming, fintech, payments, or similarly sensitive environments. • Strong technical judgment across backend systems, frontend applications, APIs, databases, distributed workflows, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and production operations. • Production experience with backend systems such as Laravel/PHP or comparable stacks including Node.js/TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, Go, Python, Ruby on Rails, or .NET. • Ability to ramp quickly in a Laravel/PHP production environment and guide engineers effectively even when not writing most of the code yourself. • Meaningful familiarity with modern frontend engineering, including React, Next.js, Vue, Angular, or similar frameworks. • Strong understanding of relational databases such as PostgreSQL/MySQL, including data modeling, indexing, query optimization, transaction boundaries, consistency tradeoffs, and production database behavior. • Experience with caching, queues, asynchronous processing, NoSQL, search, or messaging systems such as Redis, RabbitMQ, SQS, Kafka, DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, or similar technologies. • Strong DevOps/SRE instincts, including experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, observability, alerting, deployment safety, incident response, production debugging, and post-incident improvement. • Demonstrated ability to manage delivery across ambiguous or fast-changing priorities. • Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to align engineers, product partners, executives, and stakeholders around clear plans and tradeoffs. • Track record of improving team performance, engineering standards, delivery practices, and operational maturity. Preferred Skills & Nice-to-Haves • Experience managing teams in gaming, social casino, fintech, payments, cryptocurrency, blockchain, prediction markets, or other high-volume transactional platforms. • Experience managing full-stack teams that own both customer-facing product surfaces and backend/platform services. • Experience leading modernization of legacy systems, monoliths, frontend platforms, infrastructure layers, or production operating models. • Experience with containers and orchestration platforms such as Docker, ECS, Kubernetes, or similar. • Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or CDK. • Experience defining or improving engineering processes such as architecture review, production readiness, incident review, release management, quality gates, and on-call practices. • Experience with AI-assisted engineering workflows, including code generation, test generation, debugging, refactoring, documentation, code review, and developer tooling. • Experience building hiring processes, leveling expectations, career ladders, onboarding plans, and performance calibration mechanisms. • Experience improving delivery metrics, reliability metrics, defect trends, incident trends, or developer productivity metrics. • Strong analytical skills and comfort using data to inform prioritization, engineering investment, and team improvement. Education & Location • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience. • Must be able to work 100% onsite in Vancouver, BC. Why Join Us? • Lead a high-impact engineering team building a fast-growing social gaming and prediction-led platform. • Work across the full product and platform stack: frontend experiences, backend services, data stores, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, reliability, and security. • Help shape engineering culture, team operating mechanisms, technical standards, and production maturity. • Partner closely with founders, executive leadership, Product, Design, Infrastructure, and senior engineers on high-impact priorities. • Build and coach a team that owns systems where performance, reliability, security, and user experience directly matter. • Use modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted development, automation, observability, cloud-native infrastructure, and pragmatic architecture. • Join a high-growth, founder-led company with opportunities for broad leadership impact. • Receive competitive compensation and a comprehensive benefits package. .

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