Engineer Manager - Cloud Services

About Nexcess

Nexcess provides specialty cloud solutions for organizations where performance and compliance have to coexist. We serve businesses worldwide, from agencies scaling client sites to enterprises running mission-critical operations. We've built our reputation on deep technical expertise and genuine partnership with every client we work with. Behind every environment we manage is a team of people who take the craft seriously and keep showing up when it matters.

About Cloud Services

Cloud Services delivers the data protection, security, edge and value-add service products (SSL, email, EADN, and CDN/WAF) that keep our customers' applications safe and performant.

The Role

You will run and own one engineering team end-to-end: its architecture design, its delivery, and its roadmap. This is a hands-on engineering role, and you are the one person who answers for what the team lands.

The work in flight is the visible part. The job is the machine around it: how work is scoped and cut each month, what stands between a change and production, how much of it is AI-assisted, and how much of the team's week goes to things that are not engineering.

How we work

• Business alignment and focus come first. Engineering here exists to move the business, not to be busy. You will pick the few things that matter most, say no to the rest out loud with the Product counterpart, and deliver them on dates the business can plan around, at a quality that does not come back as an incident or a customer escalation. Predictable, reliable delivery of quality software is the output of this job, and everything below is in service of it.
• This job is hands-on, and more so every quarter. Management layers here are deliberately thin, and a manager who has stopped reading code cannot lead a team whose code is mostly AI-generated. You will write specs, review pull requests yourself, run the AI harness daily, and ship real work. Not the critical path, but enough that your technical judgment is current rather than remembered.
• Whoever ships it owns it, regardless of who wrote it. Most code is AI-generated now, so the judgment moved to either side of it: specifying exactly what to build, and verifying that what came back is correct, secure, and operable. Managers are more accountable in the AI era.
• You will be Product's best friend. The managers who succeed here are the ones their Product counterpart wants in the room: you shape the roadmap together, turn business need into something the team can credibly commit to and deliver as expected, and make the trade-offs legible early. Enabling the business is the point of the job; the technology and process and your team is how you do it.
• Your team goes on call for what it builds, and you take your turn on the rotation. Engineering declares risk and timelines in writing for the business to accept.

What we’ll measure

• Speed: DORA High, with Elite as the target. You get there through engineering excellence and a performance-driven culture, not through just pressure. Baseline where your team actually sits, publish it, and move it.
• Predictable, reliable delivery of quality software. Planned versus delivered every month, dates renegotiated early rather than missed quietly, defects reaching customers and incident recurrence falling.
• AI adoption and its impact. Measured by AI-assisted outcomes.

What you’ll do

• Own architecture design, delivery and roadmap for your team. Build the partnership with Product that makes the roadmap real: shape it together, commit to it, and then deliver it.
• Own the engineering outcomes for Cloud Services' product space — data protection, security, and edge services, including SSL, email, EADN, and CDN/WAF — building deep understanding of its customers, architecture, dependencies, integrations, and operational risks. Ensure the team is accountable not just for delivering work, but for the long-term health and evolution of the products it owns.
• Stay in the work. Write the specs, review pull requests yourself, and ship real changes. Your call on a design or an estimate has to be current, not remembered.
• Run the AI harness yourself, and make your team run it. Agentic tooling every day, specification-first working, automated review in the pull-request path, and reusable skills you build and share rather than leave on your own laptop. You cannot drive adoption you do not practice.
• Scope and cut the work. Turn roadmap items into scoped, estimated work with the unknowns named, run it on a monthly cycle with an explicit cut line, and report status honestly, including bad news, before it is asked for.
• Clear cross-team engineering dependencies before they block you. Find what your team will need from another team, agree it directly with that manager, and land it ahead of the work rather than escalating once it is late. Kill the ones that keep coming back.
• Hold the engineering bar that gets your team to DORA High and beyond. Know your four numbers and remove what actually slows a change down: review latency, build time, environments, handoffs, approval loops. Tests with every change, coverage gating on changed code, and evidence on the pull request rather than an assurance that it works. Release go/no-go is yours, made on evidence.
• Grow your engineers. One-to-ones actually held, a current growth plan for each, and direct feedback given early, including the feedback nobody wants. Own hiring end to end and hold the bar.
• Own what you run, not only what you ship. A fair rotation, incidents written up with actions closed on dates, toil removed rather than absorbed, and no bus factor of one left standing.

What you’ll bring

• 7+ years in software engineering, including at least one year leading engineers formally or informally.
• Hands-on technical fluency in: Perl, PHP, React, and Vue; relational databases (Postgres, MariaDB); CDN; WAF; and server security.
• Currently hands-on. You have shipped code recently; you can read a diff and review a pull request of AI-generated code and catch what is wrong with it, and you expect to keep doing both.
• Real, hands-on AI-assisted engineering, with impact you can quantify. Not a pilot and not a vendor rollout: a team genuinely working this way rather than nominally licensed, and a clear view of where it fails and what to verify.
• Evidence you have made a team measurably faster. You know your DORA numbers or an equivalent, what the bottleneck was, and what you changed to move it.
• Delivered and modernized software to committed dates, including collaborative scoping and data-driven forecasting with evidence to set and meet business timelines and commitments; operated a production on-call rotation; owned hiring end to end and held a bar; led engineers across time zones.

A must: experience in managed hosting, cloud, or another high-availability service business.

Work Environment

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an individual to successfully perform the essential duties of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential duties.

• While performing the essential duties of this job, the individual is regularly required to speak and hear
• While performing the essential duties of this job, the individual is regularly required to use hands for keyboarding, gross manipulation, and fine manipulation
• Works at a desk and computer screen for extended periods of time
• Works in a traditional climate controlled office environment or from home
• Works in a highly stressful environment dealing with a wide variety of challenges, deadlines and diverse employee population

Disclaimer

This job description is only a summary of the typical functions of the position. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all job responsibilities, tasks, or duties. Additional duties and tasks may be assigned as part of the job function. Liquid Web Inc. reserves the right to modify, interpret, or apply this job description in a way that best supports the organizational needs. The job description in no way creates or implies an employment contract. The employment contract remains “at will”.

Equal Employment Opportunity Policy: Liquid Web is committed to offering equal employment opportunity without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.

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