Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Engineering Manager role sits at the intersection of SaaS infrastructure and regulated payroll complexity, where reliability and correctness are core product features. Symmetry’s positioning as payroll tax infrastructure for other platforms also makes the work inherently platform oriented, with downstream customers depending on stable APIs and predictable behavior. The added emphasis on introducing AI into product development and the SDLC reflects a broader shift in SaaS toward AI assisted engineering practices, not only AI in end user features.
For a SaaS engineering leader, the career value is in balancing two critical tracks that recur across mature SaaS businesses: sustaining core revenue critical systems while modernizing how software is built and operated. Ownership that spans platform vision, cross functional alignment, and shared services like DevOps and QA provides experience in operating models that scale, including availability expectations, architectural clarity, and measurable improvements to delivery and quality.
This role tends to suit an experienced manager who prefers clear accountability and organization level influence rather than narrow team oversight. It will fit someone comfortable translating between product goals and engineering execution, and who enjoys leading change in established systems while keeping operational risk tightly managed.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Symmetry Software is part of Gusto. Symmetry is the payroll infrastructure for software & payroll platforms powering the paychecks of over 64 million workers each year. Our fully integrated suite of payroll tax APIs and software tools allows companies to solve tax compliance issues and build applications across the entirety of the payroll process.
About the Role:
We are seeking a seasoned engineering leader for our product development team, passionate about leveraging AI to shape the future of our industry. This role is dual-focused: providing robust support for our existing core payroll products while proactively advancing the incorporation of AI throughout our entire product portfolio and Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). You will be a crucial driver in instilling an AI-native approach at every stage of development. You will lead a significant change in our shared services groups, like DevOps and Quality Assurance. The goal is to support our engineers more actively. You will also act as strategic partners, not just as a team that processes outputs. The ideal candidate will be an "activator," bringing execution rigor and vision to champion truly innovative, smart features and core capabilities through machine learning and generative AI. Your leadership will be integral to our company's growth, ensuring AI is a fundamental component of our product differentiation.
Here's what you'll do day-to-day:
- Aligning teams to focus on new AI native features, and business goals.
- Taking complete functional ownership of your area including vision for both the platform and product in partnership with product managers and stakeholders.
- Initiating innovation, ideas, or actions by providing the initial inspiration needed to get a team started.
- Elevating our engineering practices to be AI-native, guiding adoption of tools, processes, and methodologies that leverage AI to increase velocity, code quality, and operational efficiency across the team.
- Aligning and prioritizing the organization deliverables based on the company needs, working closely with the leadership across functional departments.
- Ensuring products and services are performant, available 24x7x365, resilient, and stable.
- You will lead the transformation of our shared services groups, such as DevOps and Quality Assurance. Your role is to promote a change agent mindset. You will also adjust their function to support our engineers actively. This will help them become strategic partners for sustainable operations and ongoing improvement.
- Evaluating emerging technologies including SaaS systems for opportunities to improve services, acting as technical consultant for the company to champion applicable technical solutions.
- You will work with engineering leaders across the company. Your role involves designing clear sub-systems. You will also help improve the platform architecture used by the entire company.
Here's what we're looking for:
- Masters or Bachelor degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.
- 10+ years of engineering leadership experience – managing both people and tech stacks.
- You must have a proven ability to lead changes in organizations. Focus on DevOps and Quality Assurance. Transform these functions from cost centers into essential parts of strategic engineering.
- Prior experience or exposure in AI native product development leveraging AWS services (Bedrock, Agent Core, etc)
- A proven track record and ability to communicate with cross functional peers, communicating technical concepts to business stakeholders, and communicating business objectives to the technical team.
- Demonstrated ability to take ownership on problems and projects and lead them to completion.
- A proven ability to debug and triage critical systems, including team performance.
- Hands-on experience with agile methodologies, and their functional application.
- Strong Experience with web application development, Dev-ops, distributed systems, CI/CD and quality test automation.
- Solid knowledge of Object-Oriented Design, Service Oriented Architecture, and Systems thinking.
- Good verbal and written presentation skills, including ability to prepare materials for audiences at all levels of the organization.
Compensation Details
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $189,000/yr to $237,000/yr in Scottsdale & most major metro locations. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.
