Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering

Job Location: Dallas, TX
This position is hybrid located in our Frisco Office. 

Overview:
Are you a hands-on software engineering manager interested in helping to bootstrap a brand-new software organization at Hershey? We hired our first six software engineers over the past few months and are looking to continue expanding the organization. This is a high-impact position requiring advanced technical skills, leadership, and the ability to drive highly ambiguous projects. We don’t have a legacy codebase to maintain; we have a blank canvas. We need you to ensure we paint it with high-quality, supportable, and scalable code from day one.

This team will build software across a broad range of problem domains at Hershey, spanning from supply chain to marketing to consumer insights. This is an opportunity to work on challenging problems spanning the breadth of Hershey's business. Because of the extreme ambiguity in direction, you will be expected to pick up new skills and technologies independently. If you value the opportunity to dig into new areas and find the best solutions to problems, then please apply.

This role is hybrid in-office and reports to the VP of Software Engineering and Enterprise Data.

Key Responsibilities:

• Delivery & Technical Project Management: You own the engineering schedule. You take vague requirements for new products and break them down into concrete technical specs, milestones, and sprint plans. You ensure deliverables are planned accurately, dependencies are managed, and stakeholders are kept informed of progress (and risks) in real-time. You guide the team to make early architectural decisions that balance speed-to-market with long-term maintainability, ensuring we aren't building technical debt into the foundation of our new products.

• Operational Excellence: You help build up our operational culture from scratch. You define what "healthy" looks like before we even launch. You set the standards for the on-call rotations, incident response protocols, and runbooks. You ensure that every feature we ship is observable and  that proper logging, metrics, and dashboards are part of the "Definition of Done," not an afterthought. You raise the bar on operational support, professionalizing our triage process and ensuring that customer issues are handled with speed and rigor.

• Technical Mentorship: You actively participate in code reviews and technical design document reviews. You are the gatekeeper of quality, ensuring that the code we write today doesn't become the legacy problem of tomorrow. While you are not an individual contributor, you are technical enough to dive deep into the code to help unblock the team or troubleshoot complex production issues.

Basic Qualifications:
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent, with 7+ years of professional software engineering experience (preferably full-stack), and 2+ years of experience in a technical leadership or people management role. 
• Demonstrated success delivering new products or major features end-to-end, including breaking down ambiguous requirements, driving technical execution, and ensuring high-quality code and architecture.
• Strong technical and operational leadership: able to design and debug complex systems, enforce engineering best practices, and build healthy processes for on-call, incident response, and operational excellence.
• Hands-on experience with modern software delivery practices, including agile project management and DevOps (e.g., CI/CD, observability, incident management). 
• Success collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders across multiple business domains and excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate technical risks and tradeoffs for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Proven ability to mentor and develop engineers, foster a culture of learning, and participate in hiring and technical interviews.

Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience building engineering processes and support structures from scratch in a greenfield or startup-like environment.
• Familiarity with our tech stack (Node.js, NestJS, React, TypeScript, Azure, GitLab CI/CD) or similar modern technologies.
• Experience designing for scalability, reliability, and compliance in cloud environments.
• Track record of building and scaling high-performing engineering teams in ambiguous, fast-changing settings.