Senior Manager, Engineering Technical Lead
Job Description
Job Description
POSITION TITLE: Senior Manager, Engineering Technical Lead
STATUS: Exempt
COMPENSATION RANGE: $148,000 - $156,000 Annually
LOCATION: Based out of our beautiful West Creek Office, located at 12580 West Creek Pkwy, Richmond, VA 23238.
REPORTS TO: Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
This is a senior individual contributor role with horizontal technical leadership across multiple delivery teams.
Position Summary
The Senior Manager, Engineering Technical Lead is a senior individual contributor responsible for driving technical cohesion, engineering standards, and cross-team execution quality across Farm Bureau Tech delivery teams, including software engineering, API development, data pipelines/orchestration, and automation/RPA.
This role works horizontally across teams to establish and reinforce engineering patterns that enable reusable integration, automation-first workflows, reliable delivery, and scalable platforms. The Tech Lead partners closely with Architecture & Governance and Integration & Automation Engineering leadership to reduce fragmentation, strengthen interoperability, and raise engineering maturity without slowing delivery.
This position is designed as a “force multiplier”—enabling teams to ship faster with higher quality by aligning on shared practices, patterns, and guardrails.
Key Responsibilities
Horizontal Technical Leadership (Across Teams)
- Provide hands-on technical leadership across engineering teams (software engineering, APIs, pipelines/orchestration, RPA/automation), ensuring consistent engineering practices and reusable patterns.
- Identify cross-team technical risks, inconsistencies, and bottlenecks; drive resolution through shared standards, reference implementations, and coaching.
- Facilitate alignment across teams on “how we build” (patterns, quality bars, integration approaches) while respecting team ownership and delivery autonomy.
Engineering Standards & Reusable Patterns
- Define and socialize common engineering standards for API design, integration patterns, workflow orchestration, automation quality, and pipeline reliability.
- Establish and maintain reference implementations (e.g., API patterns, workflow templates, pipeline scaffolds, automation playbooks) to accelerate delivery and reduce rework.
- Promote an automation-first mindset—reducing manual handling, improving accuracy, and strengthening end-to-end workflows
Architecture Partnership & Guardrail Adoption
- Partner with Enterprise Architecture & Governance to ensure delivery designs align to enterprise standards and long-term ecosystem direction. (Related context
- Act as an engineering liaison between architecture and delivery teams—translating architectural intent into practical patterns teams can adopt.
Reliability, Delivery Quality, and Operational Fitness
- Raise consistency in non-functional engineering outcomes: performance, resiliency, error handling, monitoring readiness, and operational supportability.
- Guide teams toward predictable delivery by reducing “one-off” implementations and strengthening shared components and integration approaches.
Coaching & Community of Practice
- Mentor senior engineers and tech leads across teams through design reviews, pair-architecture, technical workshops, and shared decision making.
- Establish or strengthen communities of practice (e.g., API guild, pipeline/patterns working group, automation standards forum) to sustain alignment.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent experience.
- 10+ years of progressive engineering experience with demonstrated technical leadership across multiple domains (application development, integration/APIs, automation/workflows, data pipelines, or platform engineering).
- Proven ability to influence across teams without formal authority, driving adoption of standards and shared patterns.
- Strong experience designing and delivering integration solutions using APIs and workflow orchestration approaches.
- Demonstrated ability to create reusable engineering assets (templates, libraries, reference implementations) that reduce delivery time and improve quality.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience operating in a SaaS-heavy environment integrating multiple platforms through APIs, orchestration, and automation.
- Experience supporting enterprise automation approaches (workflow automation and/or RPA) with attention to governance and maintainability.
- Familiarity with architecture governance models and the ability to translate enterprise standards into delivery-ready guidance.
- Experience enabling data movement/pipelines and orchestration patterns to support operational data feeds and analytics readiness.
Key Competencies
- Enterprise and systems-level thinking
- Strong engineering judgment and pragmatism (guardrails, not bureaucracy)
- Clear communication and ability to translate complexity into adoption-ready guidance
- Influence without authority; collaborative leadership style
- High standards for quality, operational fitness, and reuse
Success Measures
- Increased reuse of shared patterns and components across teams
- Reduction in duplicated approaches and inconsistent implementation patterns
- Improved reliability and supportability of delivered solutions
- Faster delivery through reference implementations and standard scaffolding
- Stronger cross-team alignment on API, pipeline, and automation practices
BENEFITS OVERVIEW
At VA Farm Bureau, we provide an exceptional benefits package, including ongoing job development and support in all roles, paid training and continuing education reimbursement, medical and dental insurance available on your first day, generous employee 401K contribution, excellent Paid Time off (PTO) plan and more!
Virginia Farm Bureau Companies provide equal employment opportunity in all aspects of employment without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, gender, pregnancy, age, disability, orientation or veteran status.