Engineering Manager

Lead a healthy, capable and outcome-owned engineering group that delivers X3 readiness while protecting quality, customer continuity, people development and sustainable delivery capacity.

X3 context

Sage X3 is the SaaS-readiness programme for X3: a progressive transformation from tightly coupled legacy runtime patterns towards portable, cloud-operable and upgradeable capabilities. The programme protects customer behaviour, partner IP and rollback while it modernises journeys, APIs, components, data paths, business logic, delivery automation and migration economics.

The role contributes to outcome-owned squads. India is a scalable engineering and product delivery centre, connected to Europe and North America through deliberate overlap, shared standards, recorded decisions and continuous support of production outcomes.

Required technical and domain skills

• Experience leading software engineering teams delivering commercial, cloud or ERP products.
• Technical fluency across modern backend engineering, SQL/databases, APIs, legacy modernisation, SaaS delivery and automation.
• Hands-on experience with containerisation and Kubernetes.
• Ability to manage distributed teams, dependencies, hiring, performance, development and difficult conversations.
• Comfort with delivery metrics, quality gates, reliability, support economics and evidence-based governance.
• Strong English communication and the judgement to balance near-term delivery with long-term capability.

Modern platform skills for this role

• Use developer and operator feedback, platform adoption, delivery flow, reliability, support effort and cost to guide capacity and improvement. Be fluent in secure delivery, identity, telemetry, lifecycle and rollback decisions for the group; implementation depth and tool use remain with the relevant engineers.

Preferred skills

• Experience scaling India engineering capacity in a global product organisation.
• Hands-on exposure to L4G/4GL, Progress 4GL, Web/Syracuse, data migration or batch processing.
• Sage X3/Xtrem and enterprise application language experience.
• Cloud platform, migration programmes, partner ecosystems or regulated SaaS.
• Formal people leadership qualification or Agile coaching experience.

Experience and qualifications

Typically 10+ years in software delivery, including 3+ years managing or leading engineering teams. Degree or equivalent experience in engineering, computer science or a related field.

Professional English is required for global collaboration. Equivalent practical experience is valued alongside formal qualifications.

Expected outcomes / success measures

• Squads have named owners, realistic capacity, clear dependencies and a visible path to each evidence gate.
• Delivery predictability, quality, retention, engagement and technical capability improve over time.
• India delivery owns meaningful outcomes with effective global collaboration rather than serving as a hand-off function.
• Customer continuity, supportability and rollback remain protected while modernisation accelerates.

*Measures should be agreed with the squad and reviewed through the X3 monthly scorecard and quarterly evidence gates. For this role’s owned scope, show how customer behaviour and partner investment are preserved, capabilities **become portable, secure, cloud-operable and upgradeable, and quality, reliability, supportability and rollback are proven. Include safe migration and improved cost or delivery economics where relevant.*

Key stakeholders and collaboration model

Works with Product Managers, Architects, Principal Engineers, People teams, Programme Management, Security, Cloud Support/L3, Customer Services, partners and senior leadership across regions. Maintains practical Europe/North America overlap for decisions and escalation.

Sage behaviours / leadership expectations

Customer Focus, Action Orientation, Accountability, Trust, Developing Talent, Innovation and Collaboration. Creates clarity, gives context, removes blockers and holds a high bar with humanity.

Every colleague is expected to protect customer continuity, partner investment, security and the integrity of evidence. Leaders additionally create clarity, develop talent and make accountable decisions visible.

Responsibilities

Core accountabilities and decision ownership

• Own delivery capacity, staffing, prioritisation flow, quality, dependencies, risk and continuity for one or more multidisciplinary squads.
• Create the conditions for engineers, automation specialists, product and architecture partners to deliver measurable outcomes rather than activity.
• Hire, onboard, coach, develop and retain talent in India while building effective links with Europe, North America and APAC colleagues.
• Run transparent delivery and risk reviews; ensure quarterly evidence gates, monthly scorecards and scope guardrails are respected.
• Partner with Architects and Product Managers on sequencing, trade-offs, escalation, operational readiness and customer impact.
• Ensure incident learning, support knowledge transfer, security, inclusion and psychological safety are part of normal delivery.

Decision ownership:

People and capacity decisions, delivery sequencing within mandate, risk escalation, team operating model and readiness recommendations. Escalates material product, architecture, security, legal or commercial decisions with evidence.

Common capability baseline

All X3 roles are expected to build capability in the following areas. Depth and decision scope increase with level:

• Understand X3 customer workflows, metadata, customisation and architecture well enough to protect supported behaviour, partner investment and SaaS readiness in the decisions owned by the role.
• Treat the internal platform as a product: use developer and operator research, feedback and adoption evidence to reduce cognitive load; provide self-service APIs and golden paths where they solve a demonstrated need.
• Use cloud-native service boundaries, versioned API contracts and event integration where appropriate, preserving compatibility and clear ownership across X3 capabilities.
• Apply CI/CD and secure software-supply-chain controls, with identity, secrets and policy enforcement built into relevant delivery and runtime paths.
• Make services diagnosable with OpenTelemetry-compatible logs, metrics and traces; define role-appropriate SLOs, reliability and resilience evidence.
• Manage performance and cost deliberately, and engineer lifecycle, upgrade, deprecation and rollback paths as part of supported capability ownership.
• Use migration, reconciliation and compatibility evidence to preserve customer data and behaviour while moving towards portable, secure, cloud-operable and upgradeable capabilities.
• Use AI-assisted engineering securely, with human review, privacy and IP protection, regression evidence and a recovery path; use deterministic methods when they are more appropriate.
• Depth follows role scope: engineers demonstrate hands-on lifecycle capability in their discipline; managers, product and programme leaders, and architects need decision-relevant fluency, not universal coding or every tool. Containerisation and Kubernetes are required for all engineering roles. Infrastructure as code, GitOps and a custom internal developer platform apply where the role owns those paths.