Engineer Manager, Commerce Solutions

About Nexcess

Nexcess provides specialty cloud solutions for organizations where performance and compliance must coexist. We serve businesses worldwide, from agencies scaling client sites to enterprises running mission-critical operations. Our reputation is built on deep technical expertise and genuine partnership with every client. Behind every environment we manage is a team dedicated to their craft and committed to delivering when it matters.

About Commerce Solutions

Commerce Solutions builds and operates the application layer for Managed Applications, Sites & Stores products. This includes WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and other application stacks our customers utilize, along with the automation that keeps these applications current and secure for upgrades, and the tooling and images the platform uses for creation and management.

The Role: Engineer Manager

You will lead and own an engineering team end-to-end, encompassing its architecture design, delivery, and roadmap. This is a hands-on engineering management role where you are directly accountable for the team's output.

Beyond the visible work in progress, your role involves shaping the underlying processes: how work is scoped monthly, the path from change to production, the extent of AI assistance, and how much of the team's time is dedicated to non-engineering tasks.

How We Work

Business alignment and focus are paramount. Engineering at Nexcess exists to drive business value, not merely to be busy. You will identify the most critical initiatives, explicitly decline less impactful requests with your Product counterpart, and deliver on business-aligned timelines with a quality that prevents incidents or customer escalations. Predictable, reliable delivery of quality software is the core output of this role, and all other activities support this objective.

This is a hands-on role, becoming increasingly so each quarter. Our management layers are intentionally lean; a manager who no longer engages with code cannot effectively lead a team whose code is largely AI-generated. You will write specifications, review pull requests personally, utilize AI tools daily, and ship tangible work. While not necessarily on the critical path, this ensures your technical judgment remains current and not merely historical.

Ownership resides with whoever ships the code, regardless of authorship. As most code is now AI-generated, judgment shifts to precisely specifying what to build and rigorously verifying that the output is correct, secure, and operable. Managers bear increased accountability in the AI era.

You will be a key partner to Product. Successful managers here are those Product counterparts actively seek out: you will collaboratively shape the roadmap, translate business needs into credible team commitments, deliver as expected, and make trade-offs transparent early. Enabling the business is the job's purpose; technology, process, and your team are the means to achieve it.

Your team will participate in on-call rotations for the systems it builds, and you will take your turn. Engineering formally communicates risks and timelines to the business for acceptance.

Key Performance Indicators

Speed

Achieve DORA High, with Elite as the target. This is accomplished through engineering excellence and a performance-driven culture, not solely through pressure. You will baseline your team's current performance, publish it, and drive improvement.

Predictable, Reliable Delivery of Quality Software

Measured by planned versus delivered work each month, early renegotiation of dates rather than quiet misses, and a reduction in customer-facing defects and incident recurrence.

AI Adoption and Impact

Measured by quantifiable AI-assisted outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture design, delivery, and roadmap for your engineering team.
• Cultivate a strong partnership with Product to ensure the roadmap is realistic: collaboratively shape it, commit to it, and then deliver.
• Own the engineering outcomes for Commerce Solutions' product space, including WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and other customer application stacks, plus the automation, tooling, and images that maintain and upgrade them. This requires a deep understanding of customers, architecture, dependencies, integrations, and operational risks.
• Ensure the team is accountable not only for delivering new work but also for the long-term health and evolution of the products it owns.
• Maintain a hands-on approach: write specifications, review pull requests yourself, and ship real changes. Your judgment on designs or estimates must be current, not based on past experience alone.
• Actively use and ensure your team uses AI tools. Implement agentic tooling daily, adopt a specification-first approach, integrate automated review into the pull-request path, and build and share reusable skills rather than keeping them localized. You cannot drive adoption without practicing it.
• Scope and refine work: transform roadmap items into clearly scoped, estimated tasks with identified unknowns. Operate on a monthly cycle with an explicit cut line, and report status honestly, including any challenges, before being asked.
• Proactively resolve cross-team engineering dependencies. Identify what your team needs from other teams, agree directly with the respective manager, and secure it ahead of your work to prevent escalations due to delays. Eliminate recurring dependencies.
• Uphold the engineering bar to achieve DORA High and beyond. Understand your four key metrics and systematically remove bottlenecks that slow down changes: review latency, build time, environment issues, handoffs, and approval loops. Implement tests with every change, enforce coverage gating on modified code, and provide evidence on pull requests rather than mere assurances. The release go/no-go decision is yours, based on evidence.
• Foster the growth of your engineers. Conduct regular one-on-ones, maintain a current growth plan for each team member, and provide direct, timely feedback, including difficult conversations. Own the entire hiring process and maintain a high bar for talent.
• Own what you run, not just what you ship. Ensure a fair on-call rotation, document incidents with clear actions and closure dates, eliminate toil rather than absorbing it, and prevent single points of failure.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software engineering, including at least one year leading engineers formally or informally.
• Hands-on technical fluency in: PHP, Vue, and React; WordPress; GitHub Automation; and unit and integration testing.
• Currently hands-on: You have shipped code recently, can read a diff and review an AI-generated pull request to identify issues, and expect to continue doing both.
• Demonstrated real, hands-on AI-assisted engineering with quantifiable impact. This means a team genuinely working this way, not just a pilot or vendor rollout, with a clear understanding of its limitations and verification needs.
• Evidence of measurably improving a team's speed. You understand your DORA numbers or equivalent metrics, identified bottlenecks, and implemented changes to improve them.
• Proven ability to deliver and modernize software to committed dates, including collaborative scoping and data-driven forecasting to set and meet business timelines.
• Experience operating a production on-call rotation.
• Experience owning hiring end-to-end and maintaining a high bar for talent.
• Experience leading engineers across time zones.
• A must: Experience in managed hosting, cloud, or another high-availability service business.

Work Environment

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an individual to successfully perform the essential duties of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential duties.

• While performing the essential duties of this job, the individual is regularly required to speak and hear.
• While performing the essential duties of this job, the individual is regularly required to use hands for keyboarding, gross manipulation, and fine manipulation.
• Works at a desk and computer screen for extended periods of time.
• Works in a traditional climate controlled office environment or from home.
• Works in a highly stressful environment dealing with a wide variety of challenges, deadlines and diverse employee population.

Disclaimer

This job description is only a summary of the typical functions of the position. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all job responsibilities, tasks, or duties. Additional duties and tasks may be assigned as part of the job function. Liquid Web Inc. reserves the right to modify, interpret, or apply this job description in a way that best supports the organizational needs. The job description in no way creates or implies an employment contract. The employment contract remains “at will”.

Equal Employment Opportunity Policy: Liquid Web is committed to offering equal employment opportunity without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.