Manager Software Engineering - Westchester, IL

Position Overview

Follett Higher Education is a leading educational service provider and omnichannel retailer that provides students, faculty and staff, parents, and fans with the course materials, learning tools, and retail services needed to successfully support the collegiate journey. Follett Higher Education supports over 6 million students through its 1,100 physical and 1,750 eCommerce campus stores across North America.

The Software Engineering Manager leads the team responsible for Follett's title catalog and course materials adoption systems: large, business-critical .NET Framework applications (C# and VB.NET) with extensive SQL Server codebases.

This is a player-coach role. The Software Engineering Manager is the primary technical representative and operational owner for these systems, stays an active contributor, and leads the engineering team. The role carries a two-part modernization mandate: modernize how the team works, with an emphasis on AI-assisted development, and modernize the applications, moving them to current .NET, containerized deployments on Azure, and modern CI/CD.

Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Development:

• Lead a team of engineers; set clear standards for quality, ownership, and delivery and hold the team accountable to them.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads through pairing, code review, and design feedback; develop the next generation of technical leaders.
• Conduct performance reviews for associates and manage contractor and vendor performance.
• Allocate capacity across feature work, support, and modernization; provide input on staffing, hiring, and tooling.

Application Modernization & Engineering Practices:

• Own the modernization roadmap: .NET Framework to current .NET, containerized deployments on Azure, and modern CI/CD, delivered incrementally without disrupting the business.
• Bring the database tier under source control, automated deployment, and test coverage.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted development across coding, review, testing, documentation, and legacy code comprehension.
• Establish modern engineering practices, including pull-request review, automated testing, observability, and secure coding; measure and improve delivery performance.

Delivery & Stakeholder Partnership:

• Serve as the primary technical representative for these systems; report regularly on progress, risks, and issues.
• Advise engineering, product, and business leadership on technical strategy, trade-offs, and risk in business terms.
• Partner with stakeholders on priorities and sequencing; deliver roadmap work predictably.
• Own the engineering support rotation and its policies, including ticket intake, severity definitions, response expectations, and escalation paths.
• Serve as the escalation point above the rotation; communicate incident impact to stakeholders and reduce recurring support volume.

Technical Leadership & Software Development:

• Contribute production code in C# and T-SQL, focused on the highest-risk changes.
• Debug and performance-tune large stored procedure codebases.
• Lead response to critical production incidents through resolution and root-cause fixes.
• Lead code and design reviews on high-impact changes, focusing on design and long-term maintainability.
• Build reference implementations that set patterns for modernization.

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 2 years in a technical leadership or management role.
• Demonstrated experience leading software engineering teams and managing complex technical projects.
• Experience managing contractors, nearshore, or offshore engineering teams.
• Strong hands-on development experience with C# and .NET Framework, including working knowledge of VB.NET.
• Advanced proficiency with Microsoft SQL Server, T-SQL, stored procedures, query optimization, execution plans, and indexing.
• Proven experience modernizing legacy .NET Framework applications to current .NET technologies.
• Experience with Microsoft Azure, containerized application deployments, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, application security, automated testing, and modern development practices.
• Strong leadership, coaching, and team development skills.
• Ability to balance hands-on technical contributions with team management responsibilities.