Position Summary The IoT Backend Engineering Manager leads Pentair's IoT cloud backend development team as a hands-on, player-coach leader guiding and growing the team while contributing directly to design, code, reviews, and production operations. This role contributes to defining the IoT technical architecture, security, data, and deployment model, and drives POCs (proofs of concept), MVPs (minimum viable products), and the technical architecture for large-scale rollouts from the devices up through cloud architecture and integration with enterprise applications, in collaboration with technology teams in Pentair's Business Segments.
Working closely with CloudOps, DevSecOps, Quality, and partners such as AWS, the IoT Backend Engineering Manager owns sustaining support for the production backend, sprint and release planning, quality and deployment KPIs, secure SDLC practice, and the continued modernization of the backend platform. This leader also champions AI-assisted and agentic development across the team to accelerate delivery while maintaining high standards of quality and security. This individual must be well-versed in the latest technologies in IoT, cloud, and AI-assisted software development.
Duties & Responsibilities
Team Leadership & Hands-On Engineering
- Team Leadership: Lead, coach, and grow the backend platform development team, ensuring effective utilization of developers and clear ownership of services and deliverables.
- Hands-On Contribution: Contribute directly to architecture, design, coding, code reviews, and troubleshooting, and mentor team members through hands-on technical guidance.
- Code Quality: Ensure code quality, unit test coverage, and security across all backend deliverables.
- Solution Delivery: Drive POCs, MVPs, and scaled IoT solutions across Pentair's Business Segments.
- Technical Communication: Present technical topics, IoT trends, and engineering progress to the team and management; publish white papers and blogs.
Sustaining Engineering & Production Support
- Field Issue Resolution: Own current sustaining work for incoming field issues, working with the CloudOps and DevSecOps teams on triage, root-cause analysis, resolution, and prevention.
- Cloud Debugging & Serviceability: Debug and resolve cloud issues end to end by applying serviceability practices: structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, device telemetry, and diagnostic tooling. Continue improving serviceability so issues are detected, isolated, and resolved quickly.
- Device Connectivity Support: Partner with CloudOps, embedded, and mobile teams to diagnose IoT device connectivity, provisioning, and communication issues across device, network, and cloud layers.
- Proactive Monitoring: Proactively monitor the cloud environment for health, performance, cost, and reliability, and introduce engineering improvements based on observed trends.
- Business Segment Support: Provide technical support to Business Segment technology teams for testing, validation, sustaining, value engineering, and DevOps activities required for Smart Products and IoT solutions.
Sprint, Release & Resource Planning
- Resource Scheduling: Schedule resources for sprint work, balancing new feature development, sustaining work, and engineering improvements.
- Release Planning: Lead release planning with risks, dependencies,
and mitigations captured and tracked through to delivery.
- Delivery Tracking: Use Jira and Confluence to maintain transparent plans, status, and documentation for stakeholders and leadership.
Security, Architecture & Modernization
- Security Posture: Maintain and strengthen the backend security posture by following the secure SDLC (SSDLC) process, including threat modeling, secure code review, vulnerability management, and remediation tracking.
- Architecture Evolution: Contribute to defining the architecture, security, data, and deployment model, and continuously improve the architecture for scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency.
- AWS Partnership: Work closely with partners such as AWS to support the backend, adopt best practices, and develop new features and capabilities.
Quality, DevSecOps & AI-Enabled Delivery
- Quality Management: Manage quality through a defined workflow and own quality and deployment KPIs (such as defect trends, test coverage, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and recovery time).
- DevSecOps Collaboration: Partner with the DevSecOps team on continuous improvement of CI/CD, security, and engineering workflows.
- AI Adoption: Utilize and evangelize AI usage across the team, including agentic code generation, AI-assisted testing and documentation, and AI-DLC (AI-Driven Development Lifecycle) practices, with appropriate review and quality guardrails.
Qualifications and Experience Education & Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related Engineering discipline; Master's degree or higher preferred.
- 10+ years of experience in technical architecture, including 2+ years of experience in the Smart Products & IoT area.
- Demonstrated experience as a people manager, with the ability to lead, develop, and manage an engineering team while remaining hands-on.
- Designed solutions for large IoT implementations that have been commercially deployed.
- Proven track record of developing innovative IoT solutions, preferably for residential or commercial markets.
- AWS Certification at the Associate level (such as Solutions Architect – Associate, Developer – Associate, or SysOps Administrator – Associate) or related cloud certification preferred.
AWS & Backend Engineering
- In-depth knowledge and hands-on experience with the AWS (Amazon Web Services) IoT platform and services such as Cognito, IoT Core, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, CloudWatch, and Kinesis.
- Experience designing HA (high availability) architecture and DC-DR setup.
- Experience in performance testing of backend APIs and in costing the overall IoT platform services.
- Expertise in IoT application enablement platforms, device management, user management, and security.
- Experience integrating IoT solutions with smart home ecosystems such as Alexa, Apple HomeKit, and Google Assistant.
- Deep technical knowledge of IoT platforms, telematics, embedded hardware and software,
connectivity, cloud architecture, device provisioning, visualization tools and techniques, data analytics, and big data.
Networking, IoT Connectivity & Serviceability
- Solid knowledge of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, routing, and firewalls) and AWS networking (VPC, subnets, security groups, PrivateLink, Route 53, and CloudFront).
- Working knowledge of IoT device connectivity and communication protocols such as MQTT, HTTPS, and WebSockets, including device provisioning, X.509 certificate authentication, device shadows, and fleet management.
- Familiarity with how devices connect to the cloud over Wi-Fi, cellular, and Bluetooth/BLE, and the ability to troubleshoot connectivity end to end from device to cloud.
- Strong serviceability and debugging skills for cloud issues, using logs, metrics, and traces (such as CloudWatch Logs Insights, AWS X-Ray, and New Relic) to isolate root cause across services, networks, and devices.
Security, Quality & DevSecOps
- Experience implementing security across technical layers and following a secure SDLC process; GDPR compliance experience will have weightage.
- Experience with code quality tools such as SonarQube and application performance monitoring tools such as New Relic.
- Experience with CI/CD, DevOps/DevSecOps tooling, and defining and reporting quality and deployment KPIs.
AI & Development Tools
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted and agentic coding tools, including Claude, and with AI-DLC (AI-Driven Development Lifecycle) practices.
- Proficiency with GitHub for source control, pull-request workflows, and CI automation.
- Ability to define practical guardrails, prompts, and review practices that help a team adopt AI tools productively and safely.
Project Management & Process
- Proficiency with Jira, Confluence, and other project management tools for sprint planning, release planning, risk tracking, and documentation.
- Experience in Scaled Agile Framework, stage-gate process, and minimum viable product development.
Skills and Abilities Required
- Hands-on, player-coach leadership style: comfortable moving between team management and individual technical contribution.
- Strong analytical and debugging mindset, with a methodical approach to isolating and resolving issues across cloud, network, and device layers.
- Can-do positive attitude, always looking to accelerate development.
- Driven; commits to high standards of performance and demonstrates personal ownership for getting the job done.
- Innovative and entrepreneurial attitude; stays up to speed on the latest technologies and industry trends, including AI-assisted development, with a healthy curiosity to evaluate, understand, and utilize new technologies.
- Ability to lead a team of creative engineers and motivate them to deliver creative solutions.
- Ability to provide leadership to the technology team while managing multiple tasks, priorities, and responsibilities across feature, sustaining, and improvement work.
- Strong planning and risk management skills, with the ability to communicate trade-offs clearly to stakeholders.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills for interactions with technology team members, CloudOps and DevSecOps partners, Business Segment stakeholders, company leadership, vendors such as AWS, and customers.
📌 Engineering Manager(IOT Backend) (Noida)
🏢 Pentair
📍 Noida