Engineering Manager

About Nexcess

Nexcess provides specialty cloud solutions for organizations where performance and compliance have to coexist. We serve businesses worldwide, from agencies scaling client sites to enterprises running mission-critical operations. We've built our reputation on deep technical expertise and genuine partnership with every client we work with. Behind every environment we manage is a team of people who take the craft seriously and keep showing up when it matters.

About Commerce Solutions

Commerce Solutions builds and operates the application layer of Managed Applications, Sites & Stores products: the WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento and other application stacks our customers actually run their businesses on, the automation that keeps those applications current and safe to upgrade, and the tooling and images the platform uses to create and manage them.

The Role

You will run and own one engineering team end-to-end: its architecture design, its delivery, and its roadmap. This is a hands-on engineering role, and you are the one person who answers for what the team lands.

The work in flight is the visible part. The job is the machine around it: how work is scoped and cut each month, what stands between a change and production, how much of it is AI-assisted, and how much of the team's week goes to things that are not engineering.

How we work

• Business alignment and focus come first. Engineering here exists to move the business, not to be busy. You will pick the few things that matter most, say no to the rest out loud with the Product counterpart, and deliver them on dates the business can plan around, at a quality that does not come back as an incident or a customer escalation.
• This job is hands-on, and more so every quarter. Management layers here are deliberately thin, and a manager who has stopped reading code cannot lead a team whose code is mostly AI-generated. You will write specs, review pull requests yourself, run the AI harness daily, and ship real work.
• Whoever ships it owns it, regardless of who wrote it. Managers are more accountable in the AI era.
• You will be Product's best friend. You shape the roadmap together, turn business need into something the team can credibly commit to and deliver, and make the trade-offs legible early.
• Your team goes on call for what it builds, and you take your turn on the rotation. Engineering declares risk and timelines in writing for the business to accept.

What we'll measure

• Speed: DORA High, with Elite as the target. Baseline where your team actually sits, publish it, and move it.
• Predictable, reliable delivery of quality software. Planned versus delivered every month, dates renegotiated early rather than missed quietly, defects reaching customers and incident recurrence falling.
• AI adoption and its impact, measured by AI-assisted outcomes.

What you'll do

• Own architecture design, delivery and roadmap for your team, building the partnership with Product that makes the roadmap real.
• Own the engineering outcomes for Commerce Solutions' product space, including the WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento and other application stacks, plus the automation, tooling, and images that keep them current and safe to upgrade. Ensure the team is accountable for the long-term health and evolution of the products it owns.
• Stay in the work. Write the specs, review pull requests yourself, and ship real changes.
• Run the AI harness yourself, and make your team run it. Agentic tooling every day, specification-first working, automated review in the pull-request path, and reusable skills you build and share.
• Scope and cut the work. Turn roadmap items into scoped, estimated work with the unknowns named, run it on a monthly cycle with an explicit cut line, and report status honestly.
• Clear cross-team engineering dependencies before they block you. Agree them directly with that manager and land them ahead of the work.
• Hold the engineering bar that gets your team to DORA High and beyond. Remove what slows a change down, add tests with every change, and make release go/no-go decisions on evidence.
• Grow your engineers. Hold one-to-ones, keep a current growth plan for each, give direct feedback early, and own hiring end to end.
• Own what you run, not only what you ship. Run a fair rotation, write up incidents with actions closed on dates, and remove toil.

What you'll bring

• 7+ years in software engineering, including at least one year leading engineers formally or informally.
• Hands-on technical fluency in PHP, Vue, and React; WordPress; GitHub Automation; and unit and integration testing.
• Currently hands-on. You have shipped code recently and can review a pull request of AI-generated code and catch what is wrong with it.
• Real, hands-on AI-assisted engineering, with impact you can quantify, not a pilot or vendor rollout.
• Evidence you have made a team measurably faster, including your DORA numbers or an equivalent, the bottleneck, and what you changed to move it.
• Delivered and modernized software to committed dates, operated a production on-call rotation, owned hiring end to end, and led engineers across time zones.

A must: experience in managed hosting, cloud, or another high-availability service business.

Work Environment

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an individual to successfully perform the essential duties of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential duties.

• Regularly required to speak and hear.
• Regularly required to use hands for keyboarding, gross manipulation, and fine manipulation.
• Works at a desk and computer screen for extended periods of time.
• Works in a traditional climate controlled office environment or from home.
• Works in a highly stressful environment dealing with a wide variety of challenges, deadlines and diverse employee population.

Disclaimer

This job description is only a summary of the typical functions of the position. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all job responsibilities, tasks, or duties. Additional duties and tasks may be assigned as part of the job function. Liquid Web Inc. reserves the right to modify, interpret, or apply this job description in a way that best supports the organizational needs. The job description in no way creates or implies an employment contract. The employment contract remains at will.

Equal Employment Opportunity Policy: Liquid Web is committed to offering equal employment opportunity without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.