Senior Software Engineering Manager, Computing and Data Infrastructure

Job Description

Your Role

We are looking for an expert software engineering leader to manage a team of software engineers providing infrastructure services and workflow tools to researchers.

The Senior Software Engineering Manager (SSEM) for the Computing and Data Infrastructure (CDI) team is a leadership role contributing directly to IDM’s impact. The role calls for capable management of dedicated software engineers; high-quality collaboration with peers in research management to make difficult trade-offs and priority decisions; the ability to work with senior technical staff to conceive, plan, and drive strategic vision in a research setting; and building strong relationships with other teams – particularly the IDM Partner Experience team and the foundation’s Enterprise IT team – to amplify IDM’s impact through effective partner engagement and scalable technology.

Success depends on excellent communication skills; on working transparently and flexibly with research managers; on understanding and addressing the challenges of providing infrastructure services; and on building strong collaborations with other teams in order to extend IDM’s global impact.

You will contribute to decisions about software design and distribution to increase the impact of our modeling software as a global public good. This will involve sophisticated trade-offs over factors that influence the success of shared code. These could include the way code is written, its ease-of-use, run-time requirements, documentation content, and ways to increase community engagement and ownership.

Teams like the one you will lead need to be agile and adaptable. The team needs to be able to swarm to address short-term challenges, but also be able to deliver bigger projects in an iterative and adaptive way, and to explore and prototype new technologies and approaches.

This is a Seattle, WA based reporting to the IDM Deputy Director for Software.

What You’ll Do

• Team management and leadership. Be responsible for goal setting and performance management; career direction, coaching, and mentoring; and task management. Set overall strategy and direction for the team.
• Represent IDM strategy and direction in a way that supports your team’s ability to work with autonomy, mastery and purpose.
• Collaborate and coordinate with the foundation’s Enterprise IT team
• Support and collaborate with the CDI team’s Principal Software Engineer in setting technical direction.
• Partner with research managers to understand research goals and challenges, and translate into requirements for infrastructure services and workflow tools.
• Collaborate and negotiate with research managers to prioritize proposed work, align near-term development work with long-term investments, and identify emerging patterns.
• Align software development practices with IDM’s mission and values, including our dedication to open-source software and public goods, and to providing scaleable compute resources to in-country partners in LMIC.
• Collaborate with other software engineering managers to share knowledge and ideas, to promote common practices and technologies, and to coordinate shared deliverables.
• Advocate for flexible and effective software engineering practices that accelerate and facilitate our extraordinary research work.

Your Experience

• We’re looking for people with training and experiences that combine science, software engineering, and software infrastructure, to support the essential relationships for this role: managing the CDI software engineers; partnering with research managers; and collaborating with foundation Enterprise IT. The science background could be a degree or degrees, or could be experience somewhere that does computational science. The software engineering and software infrastructure background could also be some combination of education, training, or experience.
• Extensive track record as a software engineering manager.
• Experience leading software engineering projects for a wide range of user types.
• Experience leading software infrastructure implementation and roll-out projects.
• Experience designing, building, and optimizing for scaleable compute systems, including HPC clusters.
• Understanding and experience of the tools and services commonly associated with software development in research environments. (Such as GitHub, GitHub Actions, Docker, REST, SLURM, DataBricks, Data Lakes, Azure DevOps, etc.).
• Experience crafting, delivering, and supporting software, tools, and services in open-source models, particularly for use in low-resource settings.

*Must be able to legally work in the country where this position is located without visa sponsorship.

The salary range for this role is $186,400 to $288,800 USD. We recognize high-wage market differences in Seattle and Washington D.C., where our offices are located. The range for this role in these locations is $203,100 to $314,900 USD. As a mission-driven organization, we strive to balance competitive pay with our mission and new hires are typically brought into the organization at a salary between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint. Actual placement in the range will depend on a candidate’s job-related skills, experience, and expertise, as evaluated during the interview process.

NOTE: This job notice has an open deadline. Applications will be received until this position is filled.