The job, in the employer's words
About Backblaze
Backblaze provides reliable, high-availability cloud storage and backup trusted by consumers, SMBs, enterprises, and developers in over 150 countries. Backblaze Computer Backup protects the data of hundreds of thousands of customers, backing up laptops and desktops across Windows and macOS to the Backblaze cloud. We build durable, scalable systems with a strong emphasis on reliability, product quality, and a great customer experience.
Role Overview
We are looking for a Software Development Manager to lead the team responsible for Backblaze Computer Backup, spanning both the cross-platform desktop client and the backend services that receive, store, and restore customer data. The entire Computer Backup engineering team reports into this role, which you will run through Desktop and Backend Leads who own the day-to-day of their areas. You will set the long-term technical direction for the product, own its multi-quarter delivery strategy, and hold accountability for the team’s budget and results.
This is a hands-on management role. You will take part in architecture discussions, code reviews, and technical decisions across both the desktop and backend sides of the product, while also owning strategy, budget, and the growth of your staff. The right candidate brings strong experience running agile teams, experience managing managers or team leads, deep expertise in system architecture, and a track record of leading distributed, remote-first
engineering teams. You bring 7+ years of engineering management experience and enthusiasm for how AI-assisted development is changing the way software gets built.
What You'll Be Doing:
- Lead and grow the team responsible for the Backblaze Computer Backup desktop client (Windows and macOS) and its supporting backend services.
- Ensure the desktop and backend areas operate well together, with shared goals and a consistent agile delivery process.
- Provide oversight of the team's agile process, ensuring ceremonies such as sprint planning, backlog refinement, standups, and retrospectives are run well and consistently across both areas.
- Own delivery across the client and backend, from planning and design through implementation and post-launch support, partnering with dedicated QA and release teams for testing and delivery.
- Ensure the reliability, performance, and maintainability of the backup client and backend services that customers depend on to protect their data.
- Champion engineering quality by growing unit testing and other automated test coverage, and by keeping testing a first-class part of how the team builds and ships software.
- Take part hands-on in code reviews, architecture decisions, and technical problem-solving across both desktop and server work.
- Partner with Product Management to shape roadmap priorities and long-term strategy, bringing an engineering perspective to the discussion, and translate agreed priorities into well-scoped plans with clear milestones.
- Work closely with QA and release engineering teams to ensure clean handoffs, clear acceptance criteria, and high-quality delivery.
- Champion the effective use of AI-assisted development tools, guide team members in adopting agentic coding practices, and help establish team norms around AI-augmented workflows.
- Continuously improve team productivity by identifying bottlenecks, refining processes, and investing in tooling and practices that help engineers do their best work.
- Conduct regular 1:1s, deliver performance reviews, support career development, and lead hiring to grow and strengthen the team.
- Represent the team's work clearly to leadership and stakeholders, run engineering reviews, and escalate risks and trade-offs with context and recommended paths forward.
What We Are Looking for:
- 5+ years of engineering management experience leading software development teams, ideally in a cloud, SaaS, desktop software, or platform engineering environment.
- Deep experience with agile development processes, including scrum, sprint planning, backlog management, estimation, and retrospectives, with a track record of ensuring these ceremonies are run well and consistently for a delivery team.
- Demonstrated experience managing distributed, remote engineering teams, including strong async communication and remote collaboration practices.
- Strong software engineering background with expertise in system architecture, able to engage hands-on in technical discussions, design reviews, and architectural decisions.
- Solid command of the full software development lifecycle, from requirements and design through deployment and production support.
- A strong commitment to engineering quality, including the value of unit testing and automated test coverage, and a track record of building testing into a team's everyday practice.
- Experience delivering software across desktop clients, backend services, or both.
- Track record of delivering features and platform improvements on time and at high quality, balancing speed with engineering rigor.
- Effective communicator, able to represent the team clearly to leadership and stakeholders and to escalate risks early with recommended solutions.
- Familiarity with AI agentic coding tools such as Claude Code and Codex is a plus; we actively use them and value leaders who encourage their adoption.
Why Backblaze:
- Lead a team building software that protects the data of hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide.
- Own a complete product end to end, from the desktop experience customers see to the backend that keeps their data safe.
- Collaborate with experienced engineering, product, and QA teams in a flat, low-bureaucracy environment.
- Competitive compensation and benefits.
- Remote-first culture supporting work-life balance.
At this point, we hope you're feeling excited about the job description you're reading. Even if you don't meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Learning, developing, and growing are key parts of our culture. We're eager to meet people who believe in our mission and can contribute to our team in various ways. We want people to feel comfortable expressing their true selves and to come, stay, and do their best work here.
To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar-stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.
The expected salary range for this role is $170,000 - $226,000.
At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.
To understand more about the data we collect and process as part of your application, please view our Backblaze Employee Privacy Notice.
Requirements mentioned
- 5+ years of engineering management experience leading software development teams, ideally in a cloud, SaaS, desktop software, or platform engineering environment.
- Deep experience with agile development processes, including scrum, sprint planning, backlog management, estimation, and retrospectives, with a track record of ensuring these ceremonies are run well and consistently for a delivery team.
- Demonstrated experience managing distributed, remote engineering teams, including strong async communication and remote collaboration practices.
- Strong software engineering background with expertise in system architecture, able to engage hands-on in technical discussions, design reviews, and architectural decisions.
- Solid command of the full software development lifecycle, from requirements and design through deployment and production support.
- A strong commitment to engineering quality, including the value of unit testing and automated test coverage, and a track record of building testing into a team's everyday practice.
- Experience delivering software across desktop clients, backend services, or both.
- Track record of delivering features and platform improvements on time and at high quality, balancing speed with engineering rigor.
- Effective communicator, able to represent the team clearly to leadership and stakeholders and to escalate risks early with recommended solutions.
- Familiarity with AI agentic coding tools such as Claude Code and Codex is a plus; we actively use them and value leaders who encourage their adoption.
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