Contract Software Engineering Manager Jobs in Kentucky

At Slingshot Aerospace, we're on a mission to make space safer and more secure for everyone. Our work directly impacts global security, disaster response, climate monitoring, and the critical infrastructure that connects our world. We're a team of builders, thinkers, and problem-solvers who believe that the next generation of space operations will be powered by better data and smarter software.

We move fast, we're not afraid to fail, and we believe the best ideas can come from anywhere—whether you're in engineering, sales, product, or operations. If you want to work on something that truly matters, with people who care deeply about the impact we're making and help shape the future of an industry that's just getting started, you're in the right place.

What You'll Be Launching

We're seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead a team responsible for building the backend services, APIs, and integrations that connect Slingshot products, customer environments, third-party platforms, and vendor-provided capabilities.

As a manager, you will be directly responsible for the performance, development, and day-to-day execution of a software engineering team. You will create clarity around priorities, help engineers grow in their careers, remove delivery blockers, and foster a healthy team culture built on accountability, collaboration, and technical excellence.

You will also collaborate on technical direction for the systems owned by your team. Working closely with engineers, Product Management, internal stakeholders, and external vendors, you will guide architectural decisions and ensure integrations are secure, reliable, maintainable, and aligned with broader product objectives.

A key focus of this role is developing consistent and scalable approaches to product integration. You will help your team establish clear API contracts, data exchange patterns, testing strategies, and operational practices while keeping internal teams and external partners aligned throughout delivery.

Your Mission (Should You Choose to Accept It)

• Lead and manage a team of software engineers responsible for backend services, APIs, and product integrations.

• Support the performance and development of your direct reports through regular one-on-one meetings, timely feedback, performance reviews, career coaching, and actionable development plans.

• Recruit, interview, onboard, and retain engineering talent while fostering an inclusive, accountable, and collaborative team environment.

• Set clear team priorities, manage delivery commitments, identify risks and blockers early, and communicate schedule impacts and technical tradeoffs to stakeholders.

• Provide technical guidance for the backend APIs, services, and integration layers owned by the team, ensuring designs appropriately balance scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, performance, and delivery speed.

• Facilitate technical design reviews while empowering senior engineers and technical leads to own implementation-level decisions.

• Serve as a primary engineering contact for external vendors and technology partners involved in the team's integrations.

• Collaborate with vendor engineering teams to clarify technical requirements, define interfaces, review designs, coordinate testing, manage dependencies, and resolve integration issues.

• Establish clear ownership, communication channels, escalation paths, and working agreements that hold internal teams and external partners accountable while maintaining constructive relationships.

• Coordinate with Program Engineering, DevOps, QA, Security, Product, and Program Management to align dependencies and deliver complete solutions.

• Establish and reinforce team practices for technical documentation, code quality, automated testing, release readiness, monitoring, operational runbooks, and production support.

• Promote reuse of shared services, interfaces, AI best practices, integration components, and engineering patterns while maintaining sufficient technical depth to evaluate designs, challenge assumptions, and support engineers without becoming a bottleneck.

Pre-flight Checklist

• Software engineering experience in backend, platform, distributed-system, or integration-focused environments, with strong systems architecture and technical design capabilities.

• Experience directly managing or formally leading a software engineering team, including coaching, performance feedback, career development, and team-culture development.

• Experience managing team priorities, capacity, technical dependencies, and delivery commitments while translating business, product, customer, and program requirements into executable plans.

• Experience designing, building, or operating RESTful APIs, service-oriented or microservice architectures, event-driven systems, and resilient integration workflows.

• Experience with Kotlin, RESTful APIs, GraphQL, Kafka, and Typescript.

• Experience working with external vendors, technology partners, customer engineering teams, and internal stakeholders to manage cross-team dependencies and deliver aligned solutions.

• Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, including cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, automated testing, release management, observability, security, and production operations, paired with the judgment and communication skills to balance technical quality, delivery needs, team health, and long-term maintainability.

• Active or prior TS/SCI clearance.

Bonus Cargo

• Experience integrating commercial, government, customer-provided, or vendor-managed software platforms.

• Experience coordinating software delivery with third-party vendors that maintain separate roadmaps, release schedules, and engineering processes.

• Experience supporting and deploying software within classified, aerospace, defense, national security, space situational awareness, or other mission-critical environments.

• Experience managing geographically distributed or remote engineering teams and introducing structure and accountability in fast-moving, ambiguous environments without creating unnecessary blockers.

Why You’ll Thrive

You care about both people and systems. You understand that successful integrations depend not only on well-designed APIs and reliable services, but also on clear ownership, aligned expectations, strong communication, and trusted working relationships.

You're a supportive and accountable people manager. You take the time to understand each engineer's strengths, goals, and development needs while setting clear expectations for performance and delivery.

You enjoy connecting products, teams, and organizations. You can move comfortably between a career-development conversation, a sprint-planning session, a vendor escalation, and a technical design review.

You are a self-starter and are always looking for ways to improve you, your team and organization.

You create clarity where there is ambiguity, help transform one-off integrations into reusable engineering patterns, and ensure the team delivers dependable software without losing sight of long-term maintainability.

Location: Remote, US - approximately 20% travel to customer, vendor, partner, and Slingshot locations.

US-based Candidates: we are currently only able to hire residents of the following U.S. states: AL, AZ, CA, CO, DC, FL, GA, HI, IL, IN, KS, MA, MD, MI, MN, MO, MT, NC, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, RI, TN, TX, UT, VA, WA, WI, WV We are unable to consider candidates residing in other U.S. states at this time.

Internationally-based Candidates: we are currently only able to hire residents of the following locations: United Kingdom. We are unable to consider candidates residing in other countries at this time.

Equity, Diversity & Inclusion are key to our success. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and our employees are people with different strengths, experiences, and backgrounds, who share a passion for creating a safer, more connected world. Diversity not only includes race and gender identity, but also national origin, citizenship, sex, color, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic that is part of one's identity. All of our employees' points of view are key to our success, and we embrace individuality.