The Senior Engineering Manager within the NIQ Activate R&D organization will report to the Director, Activate R&D and be responsible for leading a high-performing team of software engineers while driving the development of innovative product solutions for our rapidly expanding customer base. This role operates in an open, collaborative, and innovation driven environment, leveraging modern client and server-side technologies to deliver scalable and impactful solutions.
This is a hands-on leadership role requiring a balanced allocation of responsibilities, with approximately 50% focused on engineering leadership activities such as technical reviews, planning, stakeholder management, talent development, and delivery oversight, and 50% dedicated to hands-on software engineering, including architecture, coding, design reviews, and technical problem solving.
Job Description
Key Responsibilities:
Design, develop, and deliver scalable microservices from architecture through production deployment.
Lead backend system design and implementation, ensuring robust, secure, and maintainable solutions.
Leverage GitHub Copilot and AI-assisted development tools to accelerate software delivery, improve codequality, and enhance engineering productivity.
Take ownership of development, maintenance, testing strategy, design discussions, and operations of the team, with containerized API services
Participate in all aspects of agile software development including design, implementation, and deployment.
Responsible for the end-to-end lifecycle of new product features/components
Ensuring application performance, uptime, and scale, maintaining high standards of code quality and thoughtful application design
Work with a small, cross-functional team on products and features to drive growth.
Learning new tools, languages, workflows, and philosophies to grow
Research and suggest new technologies for boosting the product.
Have an impact on product development by making important technical decisions, influencing the system architecture, development practices and more.
Requirements: Qualifications
Must have a B.Sc. in computer science or equivalent.
12+ years as a Backend developer with at least 4+ years of experience in team management.
Experience and knowledge of server-side technologies: Java, Springboot, SQL, Agentic AI
Strong experience in React
Experience with large scale SQL / NoSQL databases (SingleStore, Postgres)
Fluent with Relational databases.
Good problem-solving and analysis abilities
Good to have experience with Docker containers, Kubernetes, and Cloud environments
Experience working in agile methodologies and sprint planning
Agentic AI Experience
1+ year building agentic AI systems or autonomous agents
Experience with agent frameworks and orchestration tools (AutoGen, LangChain, CrewAI or similar)
Understanding of ReAct, Chain-of-Thought, and other reasoning patterns
Knowledge of tool use and function calling in AI systems
Experience with agent evaluation and testing methodologies
Understanding of agent safety, reliability, and error handling
Requirements - Advantage
Experience in Java backend development
Experience and knowledge of server-side technologies such as Java, Spring
Experience with Azure / GCP cloud services
Experience with large scale SQL / NoSQL databases (SingleStore, Postgres)
Experience with Agile Development, or Extreme Programming methodologies
Experience with Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI services
This position is open to all candidates.