Job Description

The Manager, Software Engineering in the Custom Development Services (CDS) team plays a pivotal role in leading development teams to deliver high-impact, client-specific software solutions that integrate with Brightspace. Unlike traditional product engineering teams at D2L, CDS operates with a services mindset; balancing billable work, strategic development, and customer collaboration.
A successful Engineering Manager in CDS ensures teams are working effectively to deliver high-quality software at a predictable cadence, while developing individuals to their full potential. This includes managing both internal developers and external partners, and overseeing work that is off-stack but tightly integrated with the Brightspace platform.
You are passionate about people leadership and building effective, resilient teams. You prioritize team development over individual contribution and thrive in environments where flexibility, client engagement, and strategic delivery are key. As you grow in this role, you stay current with modern web, mobile, and cloud technologies, and continuously refine your leadership practices to drive high performance. You take pride not just in getting things done, but in getting them done well, with a clear understanding of how each initiative ties back to customer value and organizational revenue.
The ideal candidate for this role will understand the nuances of services-based development, including time tracking and cost awareness, lead off-stack development efforts using extensibility frameworks within AWS, be comfortable operating outside of centralized product release cycles while maintaining alignment with product teams, and bring a visionary mindset to strategic projects that may evolve into future product offerings.
HOW WILL I MAKE AN IMPACT?

• Develop and enable the growth of your people and team
• Remove friction and barriers from your team's work
• Define and maintain clear priorities for the team, and create reliable plans for delivering on the priorities
• Play key role in the hiring process when needed
• Drive a culture of high quality and innovation
• Improve how we deliver software, both within your own team and more broadly as a department/company
• Produce and actively participate in knowledge sharing
• Help team make good engineering decisions by providing ongoing guidance on building solutions with simple, clean, robust designs including guiding developers working on off-stack solutions
• Evaluate and compare ROI of different types of work which is critical to a billable services model

WHAT IS D2L LOOKING FOR FROM ME?
Competencies:

• Demonstrate effective communication and collaboration skills with other teams and roles to ensure alignment and achievement of higher-level goals
• Enable effective process improvements for the team
• Demonstrate adaptability towards changing needs of the team
• Define the vision of future, connect the team's day to day accountabilities to D2L's mission and company-level objectives
• Anticipate trends and keep up to date with other teams' work, and ongoing initiatives across the company
• Effectively manage relationships with other D2L teams
• Advocate for time to invest in good engineering work

Skills:

• Sound architectural principles and design patterns
• Effective feedback communication and coaching skills
• Mapping out goals and development opportunities
• Interviewing, hiring decisions, onboarding
• Ability to apply a variety of estimation and risk analysis techniques
• Translate business goals into concrete pieces of software development work
• Lead and/or participate in a variety of cross-functional initiatives related to professional development, process/technology improvement, or other areas
• Drive productivity and efficiency, and hold team accountable for high quality outcomes

Suggested Qualifications/Experience:

• 5+ years of relevant work experience.
• Proven experience of successfully managing and leading Agile teams, ideally in a billable services model
• Deep understanding of software engineering best practices.
• Strong knowledge and experience in Agile methodologies.
• Experience managing people to high performance and reaching their potential
• Hands on experience building software.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience.

This role works from D2L's HQ in Kitchener Ontario, with a hybrid work style and expectation of 3 days a week in office.

Skills Required