Job Summary:
IDEXX is a leader in veterinary software solutions, and they are seeking a Software Development Manager to lead an agile engineering team. The role involves managing team dynamics, driving results, and collaborating closely with product management to enhance the delivery of their cloud-based veterinary practice management software.
Responsibilities:
• Lead a small, highly effective agile engineering team (typically 3–5 developers), owning the team’s delivery, quality, and overall health.
• Manage and develop the engineers on your team — running regular 1:1s, setting clear expectations, giving honest and timely feedback, supporting career growth, and conducting performance reviews.
• Hire, onboard, and retain strong engineering talent, building a team that reflects a culture of inclusion, high standards, and continuous learning.
• Drive results — translating product strategy into a clear delivery plan, breaking work into achievable milestones, removing blockers, and holding the team accountable for committed outcomes.
• Partner closely with product owners and product management to shape priorities, scope, and trade-offs that balance customer value, technical health, and delivery speed.
• Remain hands-on — contributing meaningfully to design discussions, code reviews, prototypes, and complex problem solving across the full web application stack (typically around 30–50% of your time).
• Lead technical discussions and decisions, influencing architecture and design across your team and across squads.
• Plan, document, and communicate technical projects — including status, risks, and key decisions — to engineering peers, product partners, and senior leadership.
• Collaborate with DevOps and other technical teams to plan, build, and release high-quality software, and to streamline CI/CD workflows using tools such as Jenkins and GitHub Actions.
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools (e.g., LLM-based coding assistants and agents) to improve your team’s velocity, code quality, and design exploration — and help establish responsible, effective patterns of use.
• Be accountable for the operational health of your team’s systems, working with the team to triage and resolve build failures, deployment errors, production incidents, and pipeline issues as they arise.
• Foster a culture of innovation, inclusion, psychological safety, and thoughtful risk-taking — building an environment where engineers do their best work.
Qualifications:
Required:
• People leadership experience — you have managed or led engineers (as a formal manager, team lead, or equivalent) and genuinely enjoy growing the people on your team.
• Drive, ownership, and a strong results orientation — you set clear goals, sequence work, and deliver on commitments without sacrificing quality.
• Excellent analytical, verbal, and written communication skills, including the ability to translate technical subject matter for non-technical audiences and to listen carefully across functions.
• Strong product partnership instincts — you collaborate closely with product owners, ask the right questions, and help shape outcomes rather than just executing on tickets.
• Solid hands-on technical background as a software engineer, with the ability to remain credible in design and code reviews and to contribute directly when needed.
• Strong full web application stack knowledge and a solid understanding of technologies from the database to the presentation tier.
• Experience with PHP, Node.js, and/or other object-oriented and procedural programming languages, AWS Platform, REST APIs, and data modeling.
• Experience designing system architectures and coordinating teams to design, code, test, and document significant system changes.
• Knowledge of relational databases and Structured Query Language (SQL), and experience with Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks.
• Familiarity with AI-powered coding assistants and agents (e.g., Cursor or similar) and a clear understanding of their strengths, limitations, and failure modes.
• Strong knowledge of the software development lifecycle, agile methodologies, and modern CI/CD practices using tools such as Jenkins and GitHub Actions.
• Hiring experience and a high bar for engineering talent — you can identify, attract, and develop strong engineers.
• Ability to balance competing priorities across people, delivery, and technical health, and to make pragmatic trade-offs in ambiguous situations.
• Strong general business and company knowledge, with the ability to connect engineering work back to customer and business outcomes.
Company:
10,000+ people, one global focus - enhancing the health and well-being of pets, people, and livestock We are passionate about what we do at IDEXX – and why wouldn’t we be? When you’re working to raise the standard of care for pets, make drinking water safe for billions and keep our livestock population around the globe healthy and free of disease, it’s no wonder that what we do each day is more than just a job. Founded in 1983, the company is headquartered in Westbrook, USA, with a team of 10001+ employees. The company is currently Late Stage.