Software Engineering Manager

AutoTrader.ca · Toronto · CA$140,000–CA$150,000 (stated in the posting)

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Role: Engineering Manager

Team: Activix CRM

Location: Toronto, ON

The opportunity:

AutoSync builds software that helps automotive dealerships simplify operations, improve marketing, and drive sales. We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the full-stack engineering team responsible for our Activix (CRM) Platform and related services.

You will lead with ownership: turn priorities into action, remove blockers, and follow through until work delivers its intended result. Working closely with Product and other partners, you will give engineers clear direction, meaningful ownership, and the support to build reliable software that solves customer problems.

You will combine people leadership with hands-on technical credibility and strong delivery management. You can guide engineers through design, review, and troubleshooting while building a team that makes sound decisions and delivers independently.

What you will do:

• Take ownership and get things done. Turn ambiguous goals into practical next steps, agree on clear ownership, and actively resolve blockers. Track actions through to completion. When a commitment is at risk, escalate early with options, a recommendation, and the support or decision needed to move forward.
• Lead and develop people. Set clear expectations, provide regular feedback, and support engineers through career development and performance conversations. Hire and onboard thoughtfully, address performance concerns early and fairly, and build an inclusive team where people can raise concerns, challenge ideas, and learn from mistakes.
• Plan and manage delivery. Partner with Product, UX, Data, and adjacent teams to define outcomes, scope, priorities, and acceptance criteria. Apply practical Scrum Master and project management skills: facilitate useful ceremonies, assess capacity, plan milestones, track progress, manage dependencies and risks, and report status and forecasts clearly. Agree on changes to scope or timing early and review customer outcomes and production performance after release.
• Build sustainable ways of working. Match work in progress to engineering and review capacity, complexity, and production duties. Use retrospectives to address recurring delivery problems and protect time for technical improvement, mentoring, and learning. Build predictability through better planning and execution while maintaining a sustainable pace.
• Provide credible technical leadership. Understand the application architecture, code, integrations, and infrastructure well enough to guide engineers and challenge assumptions. Participate in design and code reviews, investigate difficult issues, and provide hands-on support when needed to unblock progress. Balance delivery speed with maintainability, performance, and security while developing shared ownership and engineering judgment.
• Solve problems with curiosity and creativity. Investigate technical and delivery problems, test assumptions, and explore workable alternatives. Bring options with clear trade-offs and a recommendation, test promising approaches, and turn what the team learns into practical improvements.
• Own engineering and operational health. Establish clear service ownership and standards for testing, observability, accessibility, security, privacy, and release readiness. Define useful service-level objectives, support incident response, and translate lessons from incidents and technical debt assessments into prioritized improvements.
• Lead practical AI adoption. Help engineers use AI tools and agents across discovery, implementation, testing, review, and documentation. Establish clear context, constraints, and acceptance criteria; define where automation, human review, or escalation is appropriate. Require validation, independent engineering review, and accountable human decisions on merges and releases.
• Improve team effectiveness. Use customer outcomes, delivery flow, software quality, reliability, and team health to guide improvements. Evaluate AI workflows by their effects on quality, rework, and sustainable delivery. Share reusable guidance and support people as tools and responsibilities change.

What you will bring:

• Engineering leadership. At least five years of engineering leadership experience, with evidence of developing people, building effective teams, and delivering software products. Experience with hiring, coaching, career development, and constructive performance management.
• Ownership and follow-through. Examples of personally moving difficult work forward: resolving blockers, making decisions within your authority, coordinating others, and completing agreed actions. You raise concerns early with practical options and proposed solutions, take responsibility for commitments, and communicate clearly when plans must change.
• Hands-on technical credibility. A strong software engineering background and experience building and operating scalable, public-facing web applications. You can explain architecture and code-level trade-offs, guide engineers, contribute to design and code reviews, and troubleshoot across applications, integrations, and cloud infrastructure.
• Scrum and project delivery. Practical experience combining Scrum Master responsibilities with project management skills: planning, capacity assessment, milestone tracking, dependency and risk management, delivery reporting, and stakeholder communication. You can show how you have helped teams get delivery back on track when plans changed and how you connect engineering work to customer outcomes.
• Curiosity and practical problem solving. Examples of investigating unfamiliar problems, considering creative alternatives, and recommending a workable path. You can explain the options you considered, the trade-offs you made, and what happened after you acted.
• Practical AI experience. Experience using AI-assisted engineering workflows and helping others adopt them effectively. You can explain how you evaluate output, manage risks, and determine whether a workflow improves delivery and quality.
• Inclusive leadership. Clear communication, empathetic coaching, and the ability to build trust, handle difficult conversations, and create accountability across different perspectives and working styles.

Technical skills:

The role requires hands-on depth in the core web stack and enough technical breadth to guide the team across the Activix core and integration services, and mobile applications.

Core engineering requirements

• PHP and Laravel. Hands-on experience building and troubleshooting Laravel applications and services, including API design, authentication, background jobs, and maintainable application architecture.
• JavaScript, TypeScript, and Vue. Experience with Vue web applications and sufficient frontend experience to guide component design, state management, testing, and the Vite build toolchain.
• Data and integrations. Practical experience with PostgreSQL or comparable relational databases, Redis caching and queues, APIs, and event-driven integrations. Ability to reason about data integrity, retries, failures, and system boundaries.

Required technical breadth

• React Native mobile applications. Working knowledge of React Native and React, iOS and Android delivery, API integration, authentication, and push notifications, with sufficient depth to guide design, review, and troubleshooting with mobile engineers.
• AWS and software delivery. Experience guiding cloud deployments and CI/CD, with working knowledge of Docker, ECS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, and GitHub Actions across container-based and serverless services.
• Quality and production operations. Working knowledge of automated testing, search indexing, identity, and observability. Ability to guide the team in using its tools, including PHPUnit, Vitest, Playwright, Jest, Appium, Auth0, and Sentry.

These requirements call for informed judgment about design, review, and operations; specialist-level hands-on expertise in every supporting tool is not required.

Why join AutoSync:

You will help shape a platform used by automotive dealerships and the people shopping with them. The role gives you direct influence over how the team grows, how we make engineering decisions, and how we use AI to improve our work. You will have the opportunity to build a team that takes ownership of its services and understands the customer impact of what it delivers.

For a career where you can drive our business and shape your future, apply now. 

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