Engineering Manager / Development Manager
Owns the team rather than the code: who is on it, what they are working on, whether they are getting better, and whether the work is finishing.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
The seat that appears at about six to eight engineers, when the CTO can no longer both set direction and run one-to-ones. The common mistake is promoting the strongest engineer into it and losing both: the best engineer is not automatically the best manager, and the two jobs reward different instincts.
Education
A technical background deep enough to judge the work, which usually means having been an engineer. Management training helps and is rarely provided.
Experience
6+ years engineering plus two leading. Ask how they handled an underperformer — the answer tells you whether they manage or avoid.
Vertical / domain experience
Less important than the operating model: managing a co-located team, a distributed one and a contracted one are three different jobs.
What it pays, roughly
$138,674 median, Canada — for Managers in engineering, architecture, science and information systems, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $130,125 to $149,323 over 127,400 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters | Skiploma |
|---|---|---|---|
| No credential signals this | — | Engineering management has no meaningful certification. Evidence is people who would work for them again — ask for two, and call them. | — |
| CSM / SAFe | Scrum Alliance / Scaled Agile | Process vocabulary. Useful shared language, no evidence of capability. | Study |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
Nobody. The founder runs the team of one to three.
Still the CTO. A manager layer under five engineers adds overhead and removes context.
One manager per six to eight engineers, with the CTO stepping back to architecture, hiring and the outside world.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Chief Technology Officer (Founders & fractional leadership)
- Technical Project Manager / Delivery Manager
- Software Engineer / Developer
Engineering manager and technical project manager merge below about ten engineers. Engineering manager and CTO merge below five.
Keep separate from
If the CTO is also the line manager of everyone, nobody has time to think past the sprint.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Talks about people by name and strength
- Has let someone go, and did it well
- Protects the team from thrash without hiding reality
Red flags
- Still wants to write the critical path themselves
- Measures lines, commits or hours
- Avoids the difficult conversation
The same role in three kinds of company
This job changes shape depending on who is paying for it. An agency sells the hours, a contract shop delivers into someone else's estate, and a product company is building something it keeps — and the same title means something different in each.
In an agency
In an agency this role is usually also the client’s point of contact, which is two jobs; say which one wins when they conflict.
On a client contract
On contract work, the manager owns scope creep — the single largest source of lost margin in contracted software.
In a product company
In a product company the measure is throughput and retention, not utilisation. Utilisation is an agency metric and it ruins product teams.
What this role runs on
The software categories this job lives in. Each links to our buying brief and to the research behind it.
| Category | Who the default is | What leaving costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Management Software | Microsoft, Atlassian, Asana, Monday | The weakest in this research | The research → |
| Corporate LMS & Training Management | SAP SuccessFactors Learning and Workday Learning | Completion records | The research → |
| Revenue Intelligence & RevOps | Gong, and the merged Clari + Salesloft | High, and it is the corpus rather than the contract | The research → |