Engineering Manager

As the Engineering Manager, you will lead a distributed team of engineers, executing the technical roadmap for this production MCP Gateway. You will report directly to the ContextForge CTO / Distinguished Engineer and be responsible for translating high-level architectural vision into actionable technical implementation plans.
Your Role And ResponsibilitiesTechnical Leadership
• Lead distributed team of engineers

• Execute on CTO's architecture vision: translate high-level designs into technical implementation plans and software architecture

• Hands-on technical leadership: code reviews, architecture decisions, unblock complex technical issues

• Scale platform operations: ContextForge, Plugins, PostgreSQL/Redis, uptime SLAs

• Establish engineering excellence, e.g.: 90%+ test coverage, daily deployments, CI/CD pipelines
People Management
• Hiring (bands 6-10), mentoring, career development, performance reviews

• Foster a culture of code quality, security-first development, and developer experience

• Build autonomous feature ownership model with fast feedback loops

• Manage distributed team with async-first communication and documentation-driven processes
Strategic Partnership
• Partner with CTO and Product to translate vision into deliverables

• Provide technical feasibility input for product roadmap decisions

• Drive cross-functional alignment across Engineering, Product, Sales, and Customer Success

• Represent engineering in executive discussions and planning sessions

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

Engineering Management
• Several years of software development experience with 3+ years in engineering management

• Experience managing distributed teams across multiple geographic locations and time zones

• Proven track record of hiring, mentoring, and developing high-performing engineering teams

• Experience scaling platform operations to production SLAs (99.9%+ uptime)

• Strong people management skills: performance reviews, career development, conflict resolution
Technical Expertise
• Deep expertise in Python and FastAPI for building production APIs

• Strong understanding of distributed systems: PostgreSQL, Redis, federation patterns, service discovery

• Experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices

• Knowledge of authentication/authorization systems: OAuth2, JWT, SSO, RBAC

• Hands-on with code reviews, architecture decisions, and technical problem-solving
Process & Quality
• Established engineering excellence: 90%+ test coverage standards, automated testing, quality gates

• Experience implementing CI/CD: GitHub Actions, daily deployments, automated quality checks

• Security-first development culture: SAST/DAST, vulnerability management, compliance (SOC2, GDPR)

• Agile development methodologies with focus on velocity and delivery excellence
Communication & Leadership
• Excellent communication skills with ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders

• Strong interpersonal skills with ability to influence without authority

• Experience working with open-source communities and public roadmaps

• Direct and transparent communication style aligned with engineering culture

Preferred technical and professional experience

Advanced Leadership
• Experience leading teams working on AI infrastructure, agentic systems, or protocol development

• Track record of successful open-source project leadership

• Experience with multi-cloud deployments across any of the major hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud)

• Knowledge of Rust or willingness to learn for performance-critical component oversight
Technical Depth
• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar protocol specifications

• Understanding of A2A (Agent-to-Agent) architectures and AI agent orchestration

• Expertise in observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing

• Container orchestration: Kubernetes, Helm, multi-region deployments
Industry Experience
• Experience in the AI/ML infrastructure or developer tools space

• Background in platform engineering or gateway/proxy systems

• Enterprise software development with security and compliance requirements

• Experience building products for developer audiences

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence-from machine learning to generative AI-to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM's AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM's hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments-a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

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In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you'll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you'll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

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ABOUT IBM

IBM's greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we're also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it's time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

For additional information about location requirements, please discuss with the recruiter following submission of your application.

Client-provided location(s): Dublin, Ireland

Job ID: IBM-71906

Employment Type: OTHER

Posted: 2025-11-08T18:45:13