Senior Software Engineering Manager

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.