Description :

Job Location - Bangalore (Hybrid)

ABOUT THE POSITION :

The Dayforce Talent Product Development team builds the full Talent portfolio, Recruiting, Learning, Career Explorer, Performance, Compensation, and Succession, used globally by customers to hire, grow, and develop their workforce.

As a Senior Software Development Manager, you will lead multiple, high-performing engineering teams, drive execution of complex cross-team initiatives and elevate engineering quality, people leadership, and delivery excellence. You will shape team culture, grow future leaders, and ensure that architectural and Product decisions enable scalable, reliable, enterprise-ready experiences.

You will manage two scrum teams in Bengaluru, including Engineering Leads and individual contributors, and Partner closely with principal engineers and product leadership in North America. You will help scale talent.

The product development team's Indian engineering presence plays a key role in shaping engineering culture, cross-team collaboration and long-term technical direction.

What you'll get to do :

Technical leadership :

- Maintain strong hands-on technical depth in backend engineering, cloud-native architectures, microservices, distributed systems, and API design.

- Provide architectural guidance across multiple teams, ensuring scalability, performance, resilience, and secure design.

- Lead technical reviews, ensuring design cohesion across services and alignment with Dayforce platform standards.

- Evaluate and challenge technical proposals, ensuring solutions meet enterprise-ready requirements.

- Mentor leads, senior developers, and principal engineers on system design, performance engineering, data modeling, and test strategies.

- Partner with architects to define cross-team technical strategy and long-term architectural roadmaps.

- Ensure backend systems follow best practices in caching, partitioning, event-driven design, fault tolerance, testability, and cloud-native deployment.

- Prioritize and drive reduction of technical debt and platform improvements that enhance stability, developer productivity and long-term maintainability.

- Partner with Security and Architecture to ensure secure coding practices, threat modeling, and Architectural governance is consistently applied.

- Encourage adoption of AI-assisted development, modern tooling, automation, DevOps practices, and operational excellence.

- Drive end-to-end product quality by ensuring engineering decisions consistently support functional accuracy, usability, maintainability, and customer experience, partnering closely with Product Management to align quality expectations across the roadmap.

Execution :

- Oversee execution of large-scale, cross-team engineering initiatives with high technical complexity.

- Collaborate proactively with cross-functional partners across Product, UX, Architecture, Security, QA, Customer support and Program Management to ensure alignment, remove blockers, and drive successful end-to-end delivery.

- Act as the connective link between engineering and other departments, ensuring shared context, strong partnerships, and consistent execution across organizational boundaries.

- Drive roadmap delivery in partnership with Product, ensuring teams deliver predictably against commitments.

- Manage interdependencies between services, identifying and resolving risks early.

- Ensure teams consistently meet engineering SLAs for reliability, performance, and maintainability.

- Make prioritization decisions that balance product value, technical risk, and long-term platform health.

- Standardize development practices, branching strategies, testing frameworks, and work tracking tools to drive predictability through strong planning, estimation, and agile execution practices.

- Partner with Product, UX, Architecture, and Program Management to ensure smooth cross-functional execution.

Quality and operational excellence :

- Oversee quality metrics and embed them into team planning and retrospectives.

- Ensure teams consistently maintain comprehensive automated testing (unit, integration, performance) aligned with expectations of senior/principal roles.

- Own systemic issue escalations and guide teams through root-cause analysis, corrective action, and long-term remediation.

- Promote robust observability (logging, monitoring, alerting), operational readiness, and incident response best practices.

- Define and support on-call rotations, incident response processes, and reliability KPIs such as MTTR and incident frequency.

People leadership :

- Manage Engineering Leads and multiple development teams, building a high-performance technical culture.

- Serve as the primary point of contact for the engineering teams, ensuring clear communication, timely escalations, and effective representation of team needs, priorities, and challenges across the organization.

- Own the hiring plan, interview calibration, and partnership with Talent Acquisition to ensure timely, high-quality hiring.

- Provide coaching on performance, technical leadership, and engineering decision-making.

- Build leadership pipelines by developing future managers and senior technical leaders.

- Create an environment of continuous learning and open feedback. Proactively address team health issues and reinforce the importance of hybrid/in-person collaboration.

- Ensure onboarding programs include high-quality technical ramp-up across products.

- Model effective cross-regional collaboration between India, North America, and Europe.

- Resolve technical and organizational conflicts constructively, ensuring teams stay aligned and Unblock quickly.

- Drive performance calibration, promotion readiness, and career development for engineers and technical leaders.

What's in it for you :

Encouragement to be the best version of yourself at and away from work :

- YOUnity diversity and inclusion programs

- Amazing time away from work programs

- Support for your total well-being through our Live Well, Work Well programs targeting all aspects of your life

- Recognition for your contributions through excellent pay, perks, and rewards

- Giving where youre living : volunteer days, Dayforce-sponsored events, and our very own charity, Dayforce Cares

- Opportunities to fuel your career growth through numerous internal and external programs and events

Skills and experience we value :

- Bachelors or master's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field.

- 10+ Years of strong hands-on engineering background, including C#, .NET, Java, or equivalent backend languages. Microservices, event-driven architecture, REST/gRPC APIs,Cloud-native services on Azure/AWS, Kubernetes, SQL/NoSQL databases, caching, distributed messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ), CI/CD pipelines, DevOps automation, observability, and incident response.

- Proven experience managing multiple engineering teams and leading technical delivery at scale.

- Demonstrated ability to coach senior engineers and influence architecture across teams.

- Strong communication skills and the ability to bridge technical and business discussions.

- Experience leading distributed engineering teams across regions (India and North America) preferred.

- Experience delivering large, complex, multi-team initiatives.

- Experience in designing or operating large-scale enterprise SaaS platforms.

- Proven ability to hire, onboard, and develop engineering talent and future leaders.

- Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders across Product, Architecture, and Program Management.