Position Purpose:The Systems Engineering Sr. Manager attracts, retains, and develops top talent and inspires blended teams of systems and software engineers to deliver a stable, automated, and easy-to-consume connectivity infrastructure for The Home Depot. The role leads two connected mandates: automating the systems, processes, and device configurations that run the Networking organization; and designing, developing, and operating the Layer 4 and Layer 7 traffic management platforms that connect applications across physical, virtual, on-prem, and cloud-based load balancers and proxies.
The Sr. Manager owns the end-to-end engineer experience of connecting applications - the GUIs, CLIs, and APIs engineers use, and the infrastructure beneath them - with a focus on a simple, low-friction "paved road" that makes applications easier to develop, deploy, and support. Applying Platform and Site Reliability Engineering practices, the role balances reliability, developer experience, operational toil, and cost efficiency.
As a strategic leader, the Sr. Manager drives innovation and growth, leads managers and teams through change and process improvement, and partners with stakeholders, product teams, and vendors. The role supports planning and funding reviews and communicates complex technical and business trade-offs across all levels of the organization.
Key Responsibilities:- 20% Strategy & Planning:
- Works and negotiates with partners on the staffing of skilled engineering positions on product teams
- Contributes to and makes recommendations for strategic plans in support of key objectives in a timely and fiscally responsible manner
- Supports and nurtures strategic vendor relationships; recommends ways to influence vendors that aligned to domain, portfolio, and enterprise strategic objectives
- Evaluates new technologies for adoption across the enterprise
- Helps to identify and demonstrate emerging technologies for adoption by product teams
- 20% Delivery & Execution:
- Collaborates and pairs with product team members (UX, engineering, and product management) to create secure, reliable, scalable software solutions
- Documents, reviews and ensures that all quality and change control standards are met
- Writes custom code or scripts to automate infrastructure, monitoring services, and test cases
- Works with vendors and partners for the successful implementation of critical tooling and platforms
- Creates meaningful dashboards, logging, alerting, and responses to ensure that issues are captured and addressed proactively
- Contributes to enterprise-wide tools to drive destructive testing, automation, and engineering empowerment
- Participates in and leads review board sessions to drive consistency across the enterprise
- Makes suggestions that help drive operational excellence to create internal customer satisfaction and meet operational metrics
- Fills in on product teams for engineers who are out of the office
- 15% Support & Enablement:
- Fields questions from engineers, product teams, or support teams
- Monitors tools and participates in conversations to encourage collaboration across product teams
- Learns, through reading, tutorials, and videos, new technologies and best practices being used within other technology organizations
- Provides application support for software running in production
- Acts as a technical escalation point for the engineers on the team
- 45% People:
- Provides leadership, mentoring, and coaching to Software Engineers
- Attracts, retains, and develops top talent to build a world class Software Engineering Team
- Conducts annual and mid-year reviews by reviewing individual development plans and team feedback
- Fosters collaboration with team members to drive consistency across product teams, and finds opportunities to expose engineers to career interests
- Acts as a proponent of modern software development practices
- Guides team members in strategy, alignment, analysis, and execution tasks within and across product teams
- Participates in and contributes to learning activities around modern software design and development core practices (communities of practice)
- Builds relationships with technology leaders at other companies to learn best practices and elegant solutions to common problems
Direct Manager/Direct Reports:- Typically reports to the Technology Director, Sr. Director or Vice President.
Travel Requirements:- Typically requires overnight travel 5% to 20% of the time.
Physical Requirements:- Most of the time is spent sitting in a comfortable position and there is frequent opportunity to move about. On rare occasions there may be a need to move or lift light articles.
Working Conditions:- Located in a comfortable indoor area. Any unpleasant conditions would be infrequent and not objectionable.
Minimum Qualifications:- Must be eighteen years of age or older.
- Must be legally permitted to work in the United States.
- Mastery of an object oriented programming language (preferably Java)
- Must be legally permitted to work in the United States
Preferred Qualifications:- 6-8 years of relevant experience, including leading engineering teams
- Proficiency attracting, developing, and mentoring individual contributors and managers, and building strong, diverse teams
- Proficiency leading through other leaders - setting direction, balancing workloads, and driving accountability
- Experience driving change management, process improvement, and a sustainable team culture
- Experience with strategic and financial planning - headcount, capacity, allocations, and budget across labor, hardware, and cloud
- Experience translating enterprise goals into team objectives (e.g., OKRs) and prioritizing for maximum impact
- Proficiency managing strategic vendor and managed-service relationships, including SOW and contract negotiations
- Proficiency communicating complex technical and business trade-offs from engineers to executives
- Strong customer-experience orientation, using feedback and data to reduce friction and drive adoption
- Working knowledge of application networking - Layer 4/7 traffic management, load balancers and proxies, and DNS - sufficient to set technical direction
- Working knowledge of infrastructure automation, containerized and cloud platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, GCP, Azure), and modern CI/CD
- Experience applying Platform RE / SRE practices (SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, MTTD/MTTR) and cloud cost optimization (FinOps)
- Proficiency supporting a 24x7 retail operation
Minimum Education:- The knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a bachelor's degree program or equivalent degree in a field of study related to the job.
Preferred Education:Minimum Years of Work Experience:Preferred Years of Work Experience:- No additional years of experience
Minimum Leadership Experience:Preferred Leadership Experience:Certifications:Competencies:- Attracts Top Talent: Attracting and selecting the best talent to meet current and future business needs
- Balances Stakeholders: Anticipating and balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders
- Builds Effective Teams: Building strong-identity teams that apply their diverse skills and perspectives to achieve common goals
- Business Insight: Applying knowledge of business and the marketplace to advance the organization's goals
- Collaborates: Building partnerships and working collaboratively with others to meet shared objectives
- Communicates Effectively: Developing and delivering multi-mode communications that convey a clear understanding of the unique needs of different audiences
- Develops Talent: Developing people to meet both their career goals and the organization's goals
- Drives Engagement: Creating a climate where people are motivated to do their best to help the organization achieve its objectives
- Drives Vision and Purpose: Painting a compelling picture of the vision and strategy that motivates others to action
- Manages Ambiguity: Operating effectively, even when things are not certain or the way forward is not clear
- Organizational Savvy: Maneuvering comfortably through complex policy, process, and people-related organizational dynamics
- Situational Adaptability: Adapting approach and demeanor in real time to match the shifting demands of different situations
For California, Colorado, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Nevada, New York City, Ithaca (NY), Westchester County (NY), and Washington residents:The pay range for this position is between $80,000.00 - $220,000.00
