Senior Engineering Manager, Backend & Platform

Location: Remote (Canada)

Reports to: VP Engineering

Team Size: 18 (4 Team Leads + 14 engineers across 4 teams)

Type: Full-time

Compensation: Up to $200K CAD base + bonus

About the Company

Sage Recruiting is partnering with a well-established, enterprise software company to find a Senior Engineering Manager for the backend platform that keeps its data-sync product running. It's a real problem for anyone managing customer data across systems: when communication tools and CRMs (and everything in between) don't sync fast enough, or accurately enough, work grinds to a halt, and trust with the client goes with it. This platform exists to make sure that never happens. They facilitate moving huge volumes of data in real time and in batch, fast enough that tens of thousands of users at some of the world's largest institutions never notice a delay, without ever storing that data at rest.

The team you'd be joining has been together a long time and knows this product inside and out, but they need a leader who can turn that tenure into real growth. There's genuine modernization work ahead (a near-term .NET upgrade, and a longer-term move toward event-driven architecture). This is a real leadership mandate and with room to make your mark fast inside a stable, profitable company that's been growing for close to 30 years.

The Role

You'll take on four backend and platform engineering teams, about 18 people in total, reporting through four Team Leads. You'll report directly to the VP of Engineering, with real latitude over both the technical roadmap and how the team operates. It's a manager-of-managers role more than a hands-on one, but that's not to say you won't be getting into the code from time to time. You'll need enough C#/.NET fluency to guide architecture calls credibly, but won't be writing code day-to-day.

What You'll Do

• Directly manage 4 Team Leads and their teams: 1:1s, skip-levels, performance management, and development planning.
• Guide architecture for high-throughput, high-reliability data movement (concurrency, retries, fault tolerance, eventual consistency) — enough C#/.NET fluency to weigh in credibly, though this isn't a heavily hands-on coding role.
• Drive the team's modernization roadmap, including an active .NET upgrade.
• Partner with Product on staffing, roadmap planning, and execution.
• Define and sharpen engineering KPIs (DORA, quality, velocity), close observability gaps, and raise the bar on code quality and incident response.
• Push practical AI adoption across your teams, and partner with HR on recruiting.
• Own compliance (SOC 2, GDPR) and take part in budget and compensation planning with leadership.
• Earn the trust of a tenured team that's ready to grow, and continue to raise the bar

Who You Are

You've managed two or more teams at once, and you know how to raise the bar on a team while rebuilding its trust at the same time. You're technically fluent enough in C#/.NET to guide architecture decisions, even if you're not coding daily. You've likely spent time in more structured, mid-sized-or-larger environments, and understand how to get things done and advance your mandates in these types of environments. This isn't a fit for someone who has lived their career within "five-person startup" environments.

You Must Have

• 10+ years of experience overall, including 2–3+ years managing 2 or more teams at once.
• A proven track record managing product engineering teams and scaling high-performing orgs in cloud-native SaaS.
• Strong coaching, performance management, and career development chops.
• C#/.NET fluency, and deep knowledge of distributed backend systems (concurrency, retries, fault tolerance, job orchestration).
• Comfort with SaaS architecture (multi-tenancy, scalability), microservices, and modern API design (REST/GraphQL).
• CI/CD, observability, and incident response experience (e.g., CloudWatch, Splunk).
• Strong budget and business acumen, including FinOps principles.
• Leadership experience in remote-first, globally distributed teams.

It's a Bonus If You Have

• Deep AWS experience (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, RDS) and IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Experience scaling through rapid growth or post-product-market-fit.
• Background in data engineering, ML/AI infrastructure, or DevOps tooling.
• Experience with Salesforce, Outlook/Exchange, or CRM integration platforms.
• Exposure to event-driven architecture.

What Success Looks Like

By 90 days: real trust with your Team Leads, fluency in the products, and visibly higher delivery quality.

By 6 months: elevated team output and skill, higher morale and eNPS, fewer bugs, and AI genuinely working across the group.

Why Join

• Direct partnership with the VP of Engineering, with real say over architecture and team direction.
• A profitable, stable company that's never taken venture capital and has grown for close to 30 years.
• A capable team that is hungry for growth - real room to make a mark fast.
• Meaningful technical ownership: secure, high-throughput data movement for some of the world's largest enterprises.
• A culture that treats inclusion, psychological safety, and continuous learning as lived values.

Compensation & Benefits

• $170K to $200K CAD base + bonus
• RRSP match
• 4 weeks vacation
• Extended health, dental, and life insurance · professional development allowance

Must hold a valid Canadian work permit, or be a permanent resident or citizen of Canada.