Contract Software Engineering Manager Jobs in Minnesota

About KLDiscovery

KLDiscovery is a global eDiscovery and legal technology provider serving large law firms, corporate legal departments, and government agencies. We build and operate the products and services that legal teams rely on to manage, process, and review case data at scale. With operations across multiple countries and a client base that includes AmLaw 200 firms, we handle some of the largest and most complex matters in the industry.

About the Role

Nebula is KLDiscovery's flagship eDiscovery platform: a cloud-based SaaS product that carries legal teams from data ingestion through early case assessment, review, and production. With Nebula AI capabilities such as ECAi early case assessment, document summarization, and PII and PHI detection now central to the roadmap, the engineering organization behind Nebula is entering its most ambitious phase yet.

The Director, Software Engineering owns delivery for that organization. Leading managers and a team of engineers, this role is accountable for shipping the Nebula roadmap predictably, keeping the platform fast and reliable at scale, and building the team that does both. The role reports to the EVP, IT and Engineering and partners daily with Product, Design, and the senior leadership team.

We offer competitive total compensation that includes base pay, bonus potential, inclusive benefits, wellness programs, and perks. We use market and industry data to inform pay decisions while considering geography and labor markets, individual experience, and business needs. Individual compensation will vary, although a reasonable estimate of the current annualized base pay range for this position is $190,000 to $225,000.

Job location: Remote (but candidate must be based in the United States)

Key Responsibilities:

Delivery and execution: Run the Nebula development lifecycle end to end: quarterly planning, sprint execution, release management, and post-release quality. Set and track engineering metrics such as cycle time, escaped defects, and availability, and use them to raise predictability rather than to police teams. Surface risk early and remove roadblocks so teams can stay focused.

Cloud platform and scale. Advance the platform architecture with your senior engineers: multi-tenant scalability, performance on very large data volumes, cost efficiency, and the reliability clients expect from a system entrusted with litigation data. Sponsor modernization work in areas like service architecture, infrastructure automation, and observability, and balance it honestly against feature delivery.

AI capabilities: Partner with Product and applied research to take AI features such as ECAi, summarization, and sensitive-data detection from prototype to production quality, including model evaluation, guardrails, cost control, and the security and privacy review that legal-sector clients demand.

People leadership: Hire, coach, and grow engineering managers and senior individual contributors. Own org design, performance management, career development, and succession for the group, building a team where senior talent is well leveraged and junior talent has room to grow.

Partnership: Act as the engineering voice for Nebula with executives, Product Marketing, and Client Services, and occasionally with clients and prospects. Translate 12 to 18 month business objectives into a technical strategy the teams can execute.

Planning and budget: Own headcount planning, third-party technology relationships, and the engineering budget for the group, with monthly forecasting and variance reporting.

What You Bring (required skills):

• 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years managing engineers and experience managing managers

• A track record of shipping and operating commercial SaaS products on a major cloud platform

• Experience delivering AI- or ML-powered product features to production, or close partnership with teams that did

• Fluency in modern delivery practice: agile at scale, CI/CD, automated testing, and observability

• Demonstrated success hiring and developing engineering leaders in a remote or distributed organization

• Clear, direct communication with executives and non-technical stakeholders

• A bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to Have (preferred skills):

• Experience in eDiscovery, legal technology, or another regulated, data-intensive domain

• Familiarity with large-scale search and document-processing pipelines and with SOC 2 or ISO 27001 environments