Manager, Software Engineering
About the role
About Backblaze
Backblaze provides reliable, high-availability cloud storage trusted by consumers, SMBs, enterprises, and developers in over 150 countries. Our B2 Cloud Storage platform supports data-intensive workloads including backup, media, analytics, and modern AI pipelines. We build durable, scalable systems with a strong emphasis on developer experience, product quality, and operational efficiency.
Role Overview
We are looking for a Software Development Manager to lead an engineering team contributing to Backblaze cloud services. Your team will work across both customer-facing features and platform infrastructure, collaborating closely with Product, QA, and other engineering teams to ship reliable, high-quality software.
This is a hands-on management role. You are expected to participate actively in architecture discussions, code reviews, and technical decisions. The right candidate brings deep expertise in system architecture, a strong grasp of the full software development lifecycle, and proven ability to lead distributed, remote-first engineering teams. You bring 3+ years of engineering management experience and genuine enthusiasm for how AI-assisted development is changing the way software gets built.
What You'll Do
- Lead and grow a team of software engineers contributing to Backblaze cloud services, spanning both customer-facing features and underlying infrastructure.
- Own the software development lifecycle for your team: planning, design, implementation, and post-launch support, partnering with QA and release teams for testing and delivery.
- Contribute to feature development and infrastructure improvements that expand Backblaze cloud service capabilities for developers, enterprises, and AI workloads.
- Ensure the reliability and maintainability of cloud service components through ongoing support, bug fixes, and technical debt management.
- Participate hands-on in code reviews, architecture decisions, and technical problem-solving alongside your team.
- Partner with Product Management to shape roadmap priorities and long-term strategy, bringing engineering perspective and data to influence decisions, and translate agreed priorities into well-scoped plans with clear milestones.
- Work closely with QA and release engineering teams to ensure smooth handoffs, clear acceptance criteria, and high-quality delivery.
- Champion the effective use of AI-assisted development tools; actively guide team members in adopting agentic coding practices and help establish team norms around AI-augmented workflows.
- Continuously improve team productivity: identify bottlenecks, refine processes, and invest in tooling, practices, and team habits that help engineers do their best work.
- Conduct regular 1:1s, deliver performance reviews, support career development, and lead hiring to grow and strengthen the team.
Tools and Technologies
- Backend development: familiarity with server-side languages and frameworks used in cloud platform or API development
- Engineering toolchain: source control, CI/CD pipelines, project tracking, and artifact management
- AI coding tools: Claude Code, Cursor, or similar agentic development tools
The Right Fit
- 3+ years of engineering management experience leading software development teams, ideally in a cloud infrastructure, SaaS, or platform engineering environment.
- Demonstrated experience managing distributed, remote engineering teams across time zones, including effective async communication, remote collaboration practices, and keeping remote team members engaged and aligned.
- Strong software engineering background with expertise in system architecture; able to engage hands-on in technical discussions, design reviews, and architecture decisions.