Manager, Software Engineering — Customer Files Orchestration

Quick Facts

Software Engineering Manager responsible for end-to-end leadership of the Customer Files Orchestration Service that makes customer documents usable by agents.

Description

Lead the team that owns the Customer Files Orchestration Service, orchestrating end-to-end customer file processing—upload, storage, extraction, embedding, and indexing—so documents become usable by agents. This role requires tackling large-scale distributed systems challenges for millions of customer files, including reliability, correctness, multi-tenant fairness, and delivery/consistency guarantees. You will shape a recently formed cross-functional group into a durable, high-performing engineering team with clear ownership and credibility to guide design, roadmaps, and technical trade-offs.

Responsibilities

Service & Technical Leadership

• Own customer file orchestration service end-to-end: Upload, storage, content extraction, embedding, indexing, and observability/monitoring—balancing new capability delivery against reliability.
• Drive API-first execution with versioned contracts, documented behavior, deliberate change management, and independent deployability.
• Lead judgment on domain-defining problems: consistency models, delivery guarantees (at-least-once vs exactly-once), lease/heartbeat crash recovery, and state transitions across asynchronous service boundaries.
• Own queuing and flow-control architecture: fair queuing, rate limiting, backpressure, circuit breaking, dead-letter handling, and autoscaling.
• Champion full operational ownership: design/build/test/deploy/scale/operate with on-call, incident response, SLOs, and testing treated as first-class engineering.
• Partner with platforms and client applications teams to deliver world-class product experiences using robust orchestration across internal and external services.

Team Management

• Build and lead the Files Orchestration engineering team (hiring, onboarding, performance, career development) and stabilize a recently formed cross-functional group.
• Develop engineers combining distributed systems depth with operational responsibility, owning work from code to production dashboards, including testing/QA, deployments, and support.
• Translate orchestration and scale trade-offs to product managers and business leaders.
• Establish operating rhythms and ways of working (roadmap, stand-ups, demos, retros, support rotations).
• Provide strong technical leadership via effective negotiation and influence to converge on sound technical decisions.

Strategic Delivery

• Define and maintain engineering processes (design, code review, testing, instrumentation) to proactively identify and fix issues.
• Establish service health benchmarks (throughput, end-to-end time-to-available, failure/retry rates, per-tenant fairness, API reliability SLOs) to drive continuous improvement.
• Sequence foundational infrastructure work against product deadlines, deciding when to ship pragmatic stopgaps versus structural fixes.
• Align roadmap with company priorities in collaboration with product management and adjacent engineering teams.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Direct people management experience: 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineers (hiring/coaching/performance management).
• Large-scale, enterprise orchestration systems experience designed and operated in production.
• Extensive AWS and production Python experience.
• Python concurrency experience with production debugging of asyncio code and understanding of the GIL.
• Containerized workloads on Kubernetes with the ability to reason about pod-level concurrency, resource limits, and scaling behavior.
• Consistency models knowledge (eventual consistency safety vs user-visible corruption) and production debugging.
• Delivery guarantees understanding (at-least-once vs exactly-once) and idempotency rationale.
• Deep understanding of queues, fair queuing, rate limiting, and backpressure, including multi-tenant fairness and noisy-neighbor isolation.
• API-first instincts: versioned contracts, backward compatibility, documented behavior, and treating internal APIs as products.
• Experience building, owning, and operating a production service end-to-end, including pager/on-call ownership.
• Distributed systems and cloud fundamentals: observability and SDLC best practices.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional alignment skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Documents and document management systems (extraction, OCR, format handling, very large files, DMS integrations).
• Team Topologies experience.
• Event-driven architectures and streaming (Kafka/MSK, SQS, event-driven autoscaling).
• Durable workflow engines (Temporal, Step Functions).
• Retrieval, embedding, or indexing pipelines for LLM/agentic applications.
• Prior exposure to the legal industry.

What Success Looks Like

• First 90 days: understand the pipeline end-to-end; build relationships; own day-to-day delivery and people leadership; fix highest-leverage near-term gaps.
• First six months: deliver a technical roadmap (scale targets, queueing/fairness architecture, API coherence, structural fixes); establish operational ownership (on-call, SLOs, incident response, post-mortems); stabilize the team and show measurable reliability/throughput improvements at scale.
• First year: lead a major scale milestone; grow a high-performing team; establish orchestration as a trusted, measurably reliable service with documentation and an API surface; become a recognized engineering leader.

Benefits

• Hybrid work model for office-based roles.
• Flex My Way policies for flexibility and work-life balance, including work from anywhere up to 8 weeks per year.
• Career development and growth through Grow My Way and skills-first programming, supporting an AI-enabled future.
• Industry competitive benefits: flexible vacation, Mental Health Days, Headspace access, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, incentives, and wellbeing resources.
• Culture focused on inclusion and belonging and company values.
• Social impact: Social Impact Institute, two paid volunteer days annually, pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.

Making a Real-World Impact

Help customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency by delivering trusted content and technology.

Compensation/Other

• Base pay range (US): $118,400–$219,800; Ontario: $140,600–$190,600; may be eligible for an annual bonus.
• Comprehensive benefits including health/dental/vision/disability/life insurance and a 401k plan with company match, plus additional wellbeing and optional insurance benefits.