Job title

Software Development Manager

Company

Topdeta

Location

Pune, Maharashtra, India (Remote — Pune-based candidates preferred)

Workplace type

Remote

Employment type

Full-time

Topdeta builds hard, machine-verified coding and reasoning tasks — benchmarks, RL environments, RLVR datasets, and agentic evals — used by frontier AI labs to train and test their models. Every task is machine-verified, so a passing score is always real.

We're a startup working primarily with a distributed team of freelance/contract engineers. We're looking for a Software Development Manager to lead and coordinate this team, own delivery of our task-building pipeline, and help us scale a high-quality, reliable contributor base. You'll report directly to the founder.

Key Responsibilities

- 3+ years of software engineering experience, with practical understanding of software development and engineering workflows
- 2+ years of experience in a software engineering management, team lead, or people-management role
- Demonstrated experience managing engineers and owning team delivery, performance, and day-to-day execution
- Robust managerial, organizational, communication, and people-management skills; able to lead a distributed team effectively
- Good technical understanding of software development, architecture, testing, Git, and development practices; hands-on coding is not the primary focus of this role
- Ability to understand technical discussions, review engineering work, ask the right questions,



and make sound delivery and resource decisions
- Excellent problem-solving and communication skills — especially async/written, given a distributed freelance team
- Ability to vet, mentor, motivate, and get the best out of freelance engineers quickly
- Experience with project planning, prioritization, performance management, and stakeholder coordination

Requirements

- Experience handling the end-to-end hiring process for software developers — defining requirements, sourcing, evaluating, selecting, and building a reliable engineering team
- Strong ability to develop strategies, processes, and SOPs for software development and team management, with a focus on scalable, repeatable systems
- Proven ability to build and hyper-scale a high-quality freelancer/contractor engineering base, including talent identification, evaluation, onboarding, and contributor quality management
- Strong proficiency in at least one: TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, Java, or C++
- Experience working with large production codebases
- Strong knowledge of software architecture, testing, Git, and development practices

Good to Have

- Prior experience managing a freelancer/contractor-based engineering team
- Open-source contribution or maintenance experience
- Experience with Docker, CI/CD, and cloud technologies
- Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, data pipelines, or eval/benchmark systems

Shift 10:00 AM – 7:00 PM

Compensation To be discussed based on interview performance

📌 Software Development Manager (Pune)
🏢 Topdeta
📍 Pune