Engineering Manager

About Responsive

About the Role

Responsive is looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead and grow a team of high-performing engineers while driving technical excellence in full-stack development (Java + React). 

This is a hybrid role – part leadership, part deep technical contribution, with approximately 50% of your time spent coding. You’ll help shape technical direction, support your team’s growth, and stay close to the code. Expect to spend at least half your time involved in hands-on technical work - including architecture design, code reviews, prototyping, and implementation.

In this role, you will be responsible for technical strategy, team mentorship, and scalable system design. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to build high-performance, reliable, and scalable SaaS solutions while ensuring best practices in observability, performance monitoring, and system health.

Essential Functions

• Technical Leadership & Strategy: Define and execute the technical vision for scalable, maintainable solutions in Java and React while contributing directly to architecture and design decisions.
• Hands-on Engineering Contribution: Spend ~50% of your time coding and actively contributing to design, reviews, prototyping, and implementation.
• People Management & Mentorship: Lead a team of engineers, provide mentorship, conduct performance reviews, and foster a culture of continuous learning.
• Full-Stack Development Oversight: Ensure engineering excellence across Java backend services, React frontend applications, and MongoDB data architecture.
• AI & Intelligent Systems Development: Contribute to and guide the development of AI Agents and AI-driven capabilities
• Observability & Monitoring: Establish and enhance monitoring, logging, and tracing frameworks to ensure system reliability and proactive issue detection.
• Performance Optimization: Drive performance tuning, system scaling, and resource optimization for cloud-based architectures.
• Collaboration & Stakeholder Management: Work closely with product managers, UX designers, and other engineering teams to align development with business objectives.
• Continuous Improvement: Promote best practices in coding, security, DevOps, CI/CD, and agile methodologies.

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.

Experience

• 12+ years of experience in software development, with at least 2+ years in a leadership/managerial role.
• Demonstrated experience in a hands-on technical leadership role with significant coding contributions.
• Experience building AI Agents or AI-driven systems.

Skills, Qualifications & Ability

• Strong expertise in Java and React for full-stack enterprise application development.
• Experience with MongoDB and solid knowledge of relational and NoSQL database design.
• Experience in designing and implementing AI-powered applications, including LLMs, RAG architectures, AI agents, and workflow automation solutions
• Proven experience leading, mentoring, and developing engineers across different levels.
• Ability to build high-performing, collaborative, and accountable engineering teams.
• Experience setting technical direction, conducting architecture reviews, and enforcing engineering best practices.
• Strong experience with observability and monitoring tools such as New Relic, OpenSearch, and Splunk.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native development on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Knowledge of search and retrieval technologies such as Elasticsearch and Apache Solr; AI-driven search and NLP experience is a plus.
• Strong understanding of scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, and performance optimization.
• Proficiency in CI/CD, TDD, and DevOps practices, including Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code.
• Strong problem-solving, decision-making, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Experience leading teams in Agile environments, with practical knowledge of Scrum and Jira.