About the opportunity
A founder-led software company in the life-sciences space is hiring a hands-on Software Engineering Manager to lead a small engineering team and raise the bar on how the product is built, tested, and released. Their platform helps life-sciences organizations deliver enterprise system changes with speed, consistency, and a clear record of what changed, what was tested, and who approved it — combining AI-assisted analysis, Selenium-based test automation, and human review.
This is a player-coach role. You'll spend roughly 40–50% of your time hands-on — writing production code, debugging, reviewing changes, and pairing with developers — and the rest leading delivery, growing the team, and shaping how the team uses AI to build better software. You'll work directly with the founder and see your work land in real customer implementations.
"AI-native development" here means using AI thoughtfully across requirements, implementation, testing, and debugging — and verifying that it actually improves outcomes. You and your team stay accountable for the correctness, security, and maintainability of what you ship.
What you'll do
• Turn product priorities into scoped work, clear acceptance criteria, realistic estimates, and release plans — and lead day-to-day execution across the team.
• Write, debug, and review production code; take direct ownership of the hard or time-sensitive work across application workflows, APIs, databases, integrations, and automated tests.
• Establish a repeatable AI-assisted development workflow — from requirements through implementation, review, testing, and release — and coach developers on using AI effectively and verifying what it produces.
• Partner with QA and product to confirm completed work meets the customer need, and protect release reliability through solid review, testing, and source-control practice.
• Give leadership a clear view of progress, quality, and capacity.
26 Harbor Park Drive
Port Washington, NY 11050
888.997.2772
info@nexusstaff.com
What we're looking for — the three essentials
1. You've recently shipped production code. You work effectively in an existing application, troubleshoot across components, and can explain your direct contribution to software customers use.
2. You've led a small team against real deadlines. You can show how you scoped work, managed dependencies, coached developers, and handled delivery risk.
3. You've improved development using AI. You can show how you used AI coding tools or agents, verified their output, caught mistakes, and helped others adopt effective practices.
Strong engineering managers and accomplished technical leads who have already owned team delivery and developer coaching are both welcome.
Core technical skills
• Solid fundamentals in application development, APIs, databases, source control, automated testing, CI/CD, and production troubleshooting.
• Hands-on experience with browser automation — Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, or comparable — and keeping those tests reliable.
• The ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly, make realistic commitments, and balance speed with security and reliability.
Nice to have (not required)
• LLM-enabled applications, model integration, retrieval/embeddings, and evaluation of AI outputs.
• Selenium-based enterprise test automation.
• Life sciences, revenue management, or other complex enterprise systems.
• Software requiring audit trails, approvals, traceability, or formal validation evidence.
• AWS, Linux, containers, or Kubernetes.
Demonstrated delivery, current coding ability, and effective AI-development practices carry the most weight — the items above are advantages, not prerequisites.
What the first 90 days look like
• ~30 days: Get into the codebase, team, and customer commitments; start contributing production code; understand the current delivery and quality baseline.
• ~60 days: Put clear ownership, release criteria, and a repeatable AI-assisted workflow in place; begin coaching the team and delivering against plan.
26 Harbor Park Drive
Port Washington, NY 11050
888.997.2772
info@nexusstaff.com
• ~90 days: Show more predictable delivery and reliable releases, with a practical plan for continued improvement.
Interview process
A technical and delivery conversation, followed by a paid, time-boxed practical exercise with the company's software. You'll use AI to make and verify a change, walk through your decisions and any issues you caught, and describe how you'd coach the approach to a team. Scope, time, and payment are agreed in advance.
