Senior Manager, Software Engineering (Metrology)

Job Title

Senior Manager, Software Engineering (Metrology)

Role Summary

The Software Engineering Manager leads the Tucson software team responsible for Onto's 4D product portfolio (optical and industrial metrology). This player-coach role combines hands-on technical ownership of the codebase and architecture with people management, hiring, and cross-functional coordination across Product, Manufacturing, Service, and Quality.

Experience Level

Senior-level. Typical experience: 8–12 years of software engineering with 3+ years managing engineers.

Responsibilities

Own delivery, technical direction, and team development for customer-facing analysis software, firmware/embedded systems, and internal tooling.

• Lead, hire, and develop a multi-domain team of software and QA engineers; conduct performance reviews and succession planning.
• Set and document technical direction, architecture decisions, and platform health roadmaps.
• Remain hands-on for architecture and complex code reviews; participate in design reviews.
• Restore and enforce disciplined Scrum practices: sprint planning, standups, reviews, retrospectives, and backlog grooming.
• Own software quality and release management: defect tracking, regression testing, release validation, and release notes.
• Drive CI/CD, version-control discipline, branching/release strategy, and testing standards.
• Partner cross-functionally on NPI, engineering changes, field issues, QMS documentation, audits, and customer escalations.
• Drive adoption and governance of AI-assisted development tools and establish prompt-engineering and code-review best practices.
• Measure and report software KPIs: sprint predictability, velocity stability, cycle time, defect escape rate, PR review turnaround, on-time releases, and AI-tool impact.

Requirements

Must-have technical and leadership qualifications; preferred items listed separately.

• 8+ years software engineering experience and 3+ years managing engineers; experience leading multi-domain teams (desktop, embedded, tooling) or willingness to expand domains.
• Hands-on with regulated/QMS environments and software development lifecycle in quality-controlled settings.
• Strong technical competence in one or more: C#/.NET (Windows desktop), C/C++ (firmware/embedded), Python (analysis/internal tooling).
• Experience with source control (git), CI/CD, Jira, and modern development workflows (GitHub/Git workflows).
• Proven Scrum practitioner: sprint cadences, backlog grooming, and sprint retrospectives.
• Familiarity with soft real-time systems, instrument control, and hardware-software integration.
• Strong communication and coaching skills; ability to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and grow engineers from junior to senior levels.
• Comfort operating with ISO 9001 or comparable QMS and software validation requirements.
• Must be based in Tucson, AZ and work on-site; travel up to 30%.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience in optical metrology, interferometry, semiconductor capital equipment, medical devices, or precision-instrument software.
• FPGA development, GPU acceleration (CUDA/OpenCL), or robotic automation integration experience.
• Track record of driving adoption of AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, etc.).

Education Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, or a related technical field - OR equivalent technical experience with demonstrated software engineering leadership.

About the Company

Company: Onto Innovation

Headquarters: Wilmington, MA, United States

Onto Innovation develops process-control solutions for the semiconductor industry, offering optical inspection, 3D metrology, defect inspection, composition analysis, factory analytics, and lithography technologies to improve yield, performance, and reliability across the semiconductor value chain.