How Youll Succeed (responsibilities):

- Own the growth and career development of every engineer on the team SDE1 through SDE3; hold regular 1:1s, provide meaningful feedback, and build individualized development plans.
- Identify each engineer's strengths, growth areas, and career aspirations; create opportunities (stretch projects, mentorship, training, cross-team exposure) that accelerate their development.
- Deliver fair, specific, and timely performance feedback both informal coaching and formal performance assessments; address performance gaps early and constructively.
- Recognize and retain top talent; proactively identify flight risks and take action to address underlying issues.
- Foster a psychologically safe, inclusive team environment where engineers feel heard, respected, and able to do their best work.
- Be an effective role model for CIBC's values trust, teamwork, and accountability in every interaction.

Hiring & Team Building:

- Own the end-to-end hiring process for the team defining role requirements, partnering with the Sr SDE on technical evaluation criteria, interviewing, and making hiring decisions.
- Build a diverse, high-caliber team aligned with ASG's technical needs and growth trajectory.
- Onboard new engineers effectively; ensure they have the context, tools, relationships, and support to contribute quickly and build long-term success.
- Partner with the Senior SDE to define and maintain a consistent technical hiring bar across SDE levels.

Delivery & Execution:

- Own the team's delivery commitments; ensure work is well-scoped, appropriately resourced, and consistently delivered to quality and schedule.
- Remove blockers organizational, process, cross-team, or resource-related that impede the team's ability to deliver.
- Maintain visibility into team progress, dependencies, and risks; communicate proactively with stakeholders and escalate where needed.
- Drive a healthy team rhythm sprint planning, retrospectives, and continuous improvement practices that keep the team aligned, unblocked, and improving.
- Balance delivery urgency with sustainable pace; protect the team from avoidable churn while maintaining accountability for outcomes.

Technical Partnership:

- Partner with the Senior SDE as co-leads of the engineering team; the EM owns people and delivery, the Sr SDE owns technical strategy decisions at the team level are made jointly.
- Maintain sufficient technical context to have credible conversations about architecture, technical risk, and engineering trade-offs; you don't need to write production code, but you need to understand what your team is building and why it's hard.
- Use technical understanding to inform resourcing, scoping, and prioritization decisions; avoid committing to timelines without engineering input.
- Advocate for technical excellence protect time for testing, code quality, technical debt reduction, and operational improvements alongside feature delivery.

Stakeholder & Cross-Functional Management:

- Serve as the primary relationship owner for Product Management, QA leads, Dev Ops, and other business stakeholders in the context of team delivery and planning.




- Translate business priorities into clear engineering direction; ensure the team understands not just what they are building but why it matters.
- Represent the team's capacity, commitments, and constraints credibly in planning and prioritization discussions; push back constructively when scope or timelines are unrealistic.
- Build and maintain effective working relationships with peer engineering managers across ASG; collaborate on shared dependencies, cross-team initiatives, and engineering-wide standards.

Operational Excellence & Compliance:

- Ensure the team operates in full compliance with CIBC and ASG policies, standards, and security controls.
- As a manager of people, ensure all team members understand and adhere to applicable compliance requirements, including those specific to payment systems and financial data handling.
- Maintain operational hygiene across the team: on-call coverage, incident response participation, documentation, and knowledge management practices.
- Track and report on team health metrics delivery velocity, quality indicators, team engagement and drive continuous improvement.

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS:

- Peer to the Senior SDE : Dual-track leadership model the EM owns people, culture, and delivery execution; the Sr SDE owns technical strategy and architectural quality. A genuine partnership of equals.
- Direct reports: SDE1 (L5), SDE2 (L6), and SDE3 (L7) engineers within the Payment Solutions team.
- Product Management: Primary engineering relationship owner for requirements, roadmap planning, and delivery commitments.
- QA and Dev Ops/Platform teams: Ensures effective cross-functional collaboration on quality, deployment, and operational practices.
- ASG Engineering Leadership and Director: Reports into ASG engineering leadership; contributes to org-wide engineering manager forums, hiring, and people practices.
- CIBC HR and Talent: Partners on hiring, performance management, compensation, and employee relations matters.
- External vendors and payment processors: Provides commercial and relationship oversight for key vendor engagements alongside the Sr SDE's technical leadership.
- Peer Engineering Managers: Collaborates on cross-team delivery, shared dependencies, and consistent people practices across ASG.

COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS/RESPONSIBILITIES:

- As an employee of CIBC, the incumbent must comply with all applicable CIBC and Line of Business policies, standards, guidelines, and controls.
- As a manager of people, this job must ensure all employees within the business unit comply with all applicable CIBC and Line of Business policies, standards, guidelines, and controls.
- Hire: Select individuals for SDE roles within their team in partnership with the Sr SDE and recruiting.
- Assign work:



Direct and allocate work across team members consistent with business priorities and individual development needs.
- Assess and manage performance: Conduct performance reviews, make compensation recommendations, and take disciplinary action up to and including termination.
- Prioritize delivery: Make day-to-day delivery and resourcing decisions within the team's scope in consultation with Product and the Sr SDE.
- Recommend process changes: Propose changes to team practices, tooling, and ways of working to improve delivery efficiency and team health.
- Platform-level architectural decisions and technology strategy are made in partnership with the Senior SDE (L8). Decisions with material budget, headcount, or strategic implications are made with ASG engineering leadership.

Experience: 8+ years of experience

Who You Are (skills/qualifications):

Must Have Skills:

- 8+ years of overall software engineering experience, including at least 3 years in an engineering management or team lead role with direct people management responsibility.
- Proven ability to build, develop, and retain high-performing engineering teams; a track record of growing engineers' careers and capabilities.
- Strong technical background in backend and/or full-stack software development; sufficient depth to assess technical risk, have credible conversations with engineers, and make informed delivery decisions.
- Experience managing delivery in an Agile/iterative development setting; ability to track, forecast, and communicate delivery commitments accurately.
- Demonstrated ability to identify and resolve performance issues constructively and equitably; experience navigating difficult people situations with professionalism and empathy.
- Effective communicator across engineering and business audiences able to translate technical complexity into clear business language and vice versa.
- Strong stakeholder management skills; experience managing relationships with Product Management, QA, Dev Ops, and senior business partners.
- Experience hiring software engineers; ability to evaluate candidates for both technical capability and cultural fit.
- Familiarity with cloud-native application development, CI/CD practices, and modern software delivery sufficient to support and advocate for good engineering practice.
- Ability to hold and maintain organizational context priorities, dependencies, risks, team dynamics across multiple concurrent workstreams.

Good to Have:

- Experience in financial services, payment processing, or a highly regulated technology environment.
- Technical depth in payment systems, distributed systems, or data-intensive backend platforms.
- Familiarity with PCI-DSS, PSD2, or OSFI technology risk guidelines; experience managing compliance obligations within an engineering team.
- Experience managing teams building AI/ML-enabled products; familiarity with the operational and governance challenges of production ML systems.
- Prior experience as a senior individual contributor (SDE3/L7 or equivalent) before moving into management.
- Experience managing through rapid organizational growth, platform modernization, or significant regulatory change.

📌 Sr Manager, Software Engineering (India)
🏢 CIBC India
📍 India