Senior Engineering Manager of Backend Services at Whisker
Auburn Hills, MI
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Jul 28, 2026
Auburn Hills, MI
Jul 29, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A people-manager role leading four backend engineering pods at a consumer IoT company — covering the app-facing digital experience services, robot/device cloud services, IoT telemetry ingestion, and AWS/GCP platform infrastructure. The position carries direct hiring, performance, and career-development accountability for a blended team of roughly 9–15 engineers and contractors, while remaining technically hands-on through design reviews, code review, and architecture guidance. Strong fit for an engineering manager with a backend/cloud background and experience running distributed, device-connected systems at consumer scale.
Senior level · 8+ years · Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI · Full-time
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“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 40 people in the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (computer and information systems managers). range 25–70
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $173,779 (middle half $136,334–$212,870).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 29, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (10)
The role is titled 'Senior Manager' and carries direct reports, hiring authority, performance management, and budget ownership — the primary day-to-day work is people and delivery management, which maps to 11-3021. However, the posting explicitly calls for a 'player-coach' who writes code, leads design reviews, and participates in code review, making 15-1252 a genuine runner-up.
The degree requirement states 'BA/BS … and/or equivalent years of experience', so no formal degree is hard-gated.
The 8-year overall experience requirement is stated at the role level; the 3-year management requirement is also role-level and is captured in the overall years minimum (8) as the higher of the two stated minimums.
Kafka and Kinesis are listed as interchangeable examples of high-volume data ingestion technology in the requirements section; captured as one skill with Kinesis as an alternative.
Containerization and serverless are presented as alternative deployment models in the requirements section; captured as one skill.
GCP appears only in the body narrative (not the requirements section) alongside AWS, so it is marked preferred.
MQTT, Kubernetes, ECS, Terraform, and GraphQL all appear exclusively under the 'Not Required but Nice to Have' section.
No compensation figures are provided in the posting.
The role is hybrid, based out of Auburn Hills, MI (Detroit metro CBSA). Auburn Hills is within the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn CBSA (19820).
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): API design.
Read the full posting
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