Sr Manager, Software Engineering

How Youll Succeed (responsibilities):

• Own the growth and career development of every engineer on the team SDE1 through SDE3; hold regular 1:1s, provide meaningful feedback, and build individualized development plans.
• Identify each engineer's strengths, growth areas, and career aspirations; create opportunities (stretch projects, mentorship, training, cross-team exposure) that accelerate their development.
• Deliver fair, specific, and timely performance feedback both informal coaching and formal performance assessments; address performance gaps early and constructively.
• Recognize and retain top talent; proactively identify flight risks and take action to address underlying issues.
• Foster a psychologically safe, inclusive team environment where engineers feel heard, respected, and able to do their best work.
• Be an effective role model for CIBC's values trust, teamwork, and accountability in every interaction.

Hiring & Team Building:

• Own the end-to-end hiring process for the team defining role requirements, partnering with the Sr SDE on technical evaluation criteria, interviewing, and making hiring decisions.
• Build a diverse, high-caliber team aligned with ASG's technical needs and growth trajectory.
• Onboard new engineers effectively; ensure they have the context, tools, relationships, and support to contribute quickly and build long-term success.
• Partner with the Senior SDE to define and maintain a consistent technical hiring bar across SDE levels.

Delivery & Execution:

• Own the team's delivery commitments; ensure work is well-scoped, appropriately resourced, and consistently delivered to quality and schedule.
• Remove blockers organizational, process, cross-team, or resource-related that impede the team's ability to deliver.
• Maintain visibility into team progress, dependencies, and risks; communicate proactively with stakeholders and escalate where needed.
• Drive a healthy team rhythm sprint planning, retrospectives, and continuous improvement practices that keep the team aligned, unblocked, and improving.
• Balance delivery urgency with sustainable pace; protect the team from avoidable churn while maintaining accountability for outcomes.

Technical Partnership:

• Partner with the Senior SDE as co-leads of the engineering team; the EM owns people and delivery, the Sr SDE owns technical strategy decisions at the team level are made jointly.
• Maintain sufficient technical context to have credible conversations about architecture, technical risk, and engineering trade-offs; you don't need to write production code, but you need to understand what your team is building and why it's hard.
• Use technical understanding to inform resourcing, scoping, and prioritization decisions; avoid committing to timelines without engineering input.
• Advocate for technical excellence protect time for testing, code quality, technical debt reduction, and operational improvements alongside feature delivery.

Stakeholder & Cross-Functional Management:

• Serve as the primary relationship owner for Product Management, QA leads, DevOps, and other business stakeholders in the context of team delivery and planning.
• Translate business priorities into clear engineering direction; ensure the team understands not just what they are building but why it matters.
• Represent the team's capacity, commitments, and constraints credibly in planning and prioritization discussions; push back constructively when scope or timelines are unrealistic.
• Build and maintain effective working relationships with peer engineering managers across ASG; collaborate on shared dependencies, cross-team initiatives, and engineering-wide standards.

Operational Excellence & Compliance:

• Ensure the team operates in full compliance with CIBC and ASG policies, standards, and security controls.
• As a manager of people, ensure all team members understand and adhere to applicable compliance requirements, including those specific to payment systems and financial data handling.
• Maintain operational hygiene across the team: on-call coverage, incident response participation, documentation, and knowledge management practices.
• Track and report on team health metrics delivery velocity, quality indicators, team engagement and drive continuous improvement.

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS:

• Peer to the Senior SDE : Dual-track leadership model the EM owns people, culture, and delivery execution; the Sr SDE owns technical strategy and architectural quality. A genuine partnership of equals.
• Direct reports: SDE1 (L5), SDE2 (L6), and SDE3 (L7) engineers within the Payment Solutions team.
• Product Management: Primary engineering relationship owner for requirements, roadmap planning, and delivery commitments.
• QA and DevOps/Platform teams: Ensures effective cross-functional collaboration on quality, deployment, and operational practices.
• ASG Engineering Leadership and Director: Reports into ASG engineering leadership; contributes to org-wide engineering manager forums, hiring, and people practices.
• CIBC HR and Talent: Partners on hiring, performance management, compensation, and employee relations matters.
• External vendors and payment processors: Provides commercial and relationship oversight for key vendor engagements alongside the Sr SDE's technical leadership.
• Peer Engineering Managers: Collaborates on cross-team delivery, shared dependencies, and consistent people practices across ASG.

COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS/RESPONSIBILITIES:

• As an employee of CIBC, the incumbent must comply with all applicable CIBC and Line of Business policies, standards, guidelines, and controls.
• As a manager of people, this job must ensure all employees within the business unit comply with all applicable CIBC and Line of Business policies, standards, guidelines, and controls.
  • Hire: Select individuals for SDE roles within their team in partnership with the Sr SDE and recruiting.
  • Assign work: Direct and allocate work across team members consistent with business priorities and individual development needs.
  • Assess and manage performance: Conduct performance reviews, make compensation recommendations, and take disciplinary action up to and including termination.
  • Prioritize delivery: Make day-to-day delivery and resourcing decisions within the team's scope in consultation with Product and the Sr SDE.
  • Recommend process changes: Propose changes to team practices, tooling, and ways of working to improve delivery efficiency and team health.
  • Platform-level architectural decisions and technology strategy are made in partnership with the Senior SDE (L8). Decisions with material budget, headcount, or strategic implications are made with ASG engineering leadership.

Experience: 8+ years of experience

Who You Are (skills/qualifications):

Must Have Skills:

• 8+ years of overall software engineering experience, including at least 3 years in an engineering management or team lead role with direct people management responsibility.
• Proven ability to build, develop, and retain high-performing engineering teams; a track record of growing engineers' careers and capabilities.
• Strong technical background in backend and/or full-stack software development; sufficient depth to assess technical risk, have credible conversations with engineers, and make informed delivery decisions.
• Experience managing delivery in an Agile/iterative development environment; ability to track, forecast, and communicate delivery commitments accurately.
• Demonstrated ability to identify and resolve performance issues constructively and equitably; experience navigating difficult people situations with professionalism and empathy.
• Effective communicator across engineering and business audiences able to translate technical complexity into clear business language and vice versa.
• Strong stakeholder management skills; experience managing relationships with Product Management, QA, DevOps, and senior business partners.
• Experience hiring software engineers; ability to evaluate candidates for both technical capability and cultural fit.
• Familiarity with cloud-native application development, CI/CD practices, and modern software delivery sufficient to support and advocate for good engineering practice.
• Ability to hold and maintain organizational context priorities, dependencies, risks, team dynamics across multiple concurrent workstreams.

Good to Have:

• Experience in financial services, payment processing, or a highly regulated technology environment.
• Technical depth in payment systems, distributed systems, or data-intensive backend platforms.
• Familiarity with PCI-DSS, PSD2, or OSFI technology risk guidelines; experience managing compliance obligations within an engineering team.
• Experience managing teams building AI/ML-enabled products; familiarity with the operational and governance challenges of production ML systems.
• Prior experience as a senior individual contributor (SDE3/L7 or equivalent) before moving into management.
• Experience managing through rapid organizational growth, platform modernization, or significant regulatory change.