Development Manager at Aquifer - Remote Worldwide — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
This Development Manager role at Aquifer is listed as open to applicants anywhere in the world, making it a strong candidate for location-independent professionals. The role involves managing distributed engineering teams, which signals an established async-compatible culture — a genuine plus for digital nomads.
Timezone flexibility: No specific timezone is mandated in the posting. However, managing multiple engineering pods and participating in planning cadences at every sprint will likely require some overlap hours with a US-based team (likely Eastern Time, given the New Hampshire HQ). Expect at least 4–6 hours of daily overlap, which could constrain extreme timezone differences (e.g., Southeast Asia may require early morning calls).
Visa considerations: Since no country restrictions are listed, digital nomad visas in popular destinations could work well:
- Portugal (D8 Visa) – Good timezone overlap with US East Coast; popular nomad hubs in Lisbon and Porto.
- Colombia (Medellín) – Same or adjacent timezone to US East, low cost of living, strong internet infrastructure.
- Mexico (Temporary Resident Visa) – Convenient for US timezone alignment; cities like Mexico City and Oaxaca have thriving nomad scenes.
No travel-specific perks (coworking stipend, equipment budget) are mentioned in the posting. For a senior management role, it would be worth negotiating these during the offer stage.
Headquarters: New Hampshire
URL: https://aquifer.org/
Summary
The Development Manager reports into the Chief Technology Officer and owns the engineering capacity, delivery commitments, and technical execution quality across Aquifer's development pods. This role directly manages all engineers, including pod tech leads and a technical architect, with full people-management responsibility. The Development Manager owns release reliability and the delivery/quality dimensions of engineering performance.
Responsibilities
- Ensure engineering executes the cadence necessary to deliver on roadmap commitments set by the Lead Product Manager.
- Own engineering scorecard metrics for quality and delivery.
- Directly manage all engineers, including both pod tech leads: performance, career development, hiring, and day-to-day support.
- Provide meaningful roles and assignments for engineers through talent and capability mapping.
- Own engineering capacity planning, translating roadmap commitments into realistic delivery plans.
- Own release reliability and production quality across both pods.
- Participate in engineering planning at every cadence.
- Lead the effort with the Technical Architect to adopt AI development best practices to increase velocity and quality.
- Support and grow the existing Rails-based product with attention to technical sustainability and delivery cost.
- Partner with the Lead Product Manager and both tech leads on cross-functional delivery planning.
Qualifications
- Proven experience managing engineering teams, engineering managers, or senior individual contributors — ideally in a Ruby on Rails environment.
- Track record of owning delivery commitments and release quality for a live SaaS product.
- Experience managing distributed or multi-site engineering teams.
- Demonstrated ability to evaluate the technical judgment and output of senior or staff-level engineers.
- Comfortable setting and enforcing technical and process guardrails for AI-assisted software development.
- Experience running structured capability assessments (e.g., evaluating a technical architect against defined deliverables) is a plus.
- Working familiarity with Jira/Confluence.
To apply: https://weworkremotely.com/remote-jobs/aquifer-development-manager
Frequently Asked Questions
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