Manager - Software Development

Location: Reading, PA, United States

Manager - Software Development

Customer Digital Engineering Group

Summary Statement:

The Manager of Software Development within Penske’s Customer Digital Engineering (CDE) group leads high‑performing engineering teams responsible for delivering innovative, scalable, and high‑quality digital solutions across customer-facing platforms. This role provides day‑to‑day leadership, drives modern engineering practices, and ensures exceptional user experiences while aligning outcomes with business vision. Leveraging strong technical expertise and strategic thinking, the manager guides teams through the full SDLC, enables modernization, fosters cross‑functional collaboration, and removes organizational and technical barriers. In this role, you will shape the future of our highly visible digital platforms, where your work impacts online revenue and user engagement, while growing your career in a customer-facing engineering environment.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Lead engineering teams in the design, development, enhancement, and support of customer-facing digital applications, ensuring quality, performance, reliability, and security.

• Collaborate with Business stakeholders, Product Managers, UX/UI Designers, Cloud Platform Engineers, DevOps, and vendors to shape roadmaps and deliver strategic outcomes.

• Guide teams through the full SDLC; conduct performance reviews; mentor engineers; and cultivate a culture of continuous learning and innovation.

• Proactively identify risks and remove blockers; lead post-incident reviews to strengthen platform resilience and prevent recurrence.

• Champion modernization initiatives, including cloud adoption, improved reliability and observability, and incorporation of emerging technologies and AI-driven capabilities.

• Communicate priorities, timelines, risks, and trade-offs; align technical decisions and roadmaps with business goals.

Penske Responsibilities:

• Provide day-to-day leadership of engineering teams across front-end, back-end, and cloud services with emphasis on quality, observability, and operational excellence.

• Prioritize and deliver development projects aligned with evolving customer and business needs while balancing new capabilities with continuous technical improvements.

• Ensure seamless integration between front-end applications, backend services, APIs, and enterprise systems.

• Track key engineering and platform metrics (availability, performance, defects, throughput, velocity) and use them to drive continuous improvement.

• Proactively identify delivery and operational risks with clear mitigation plans; lead incident response and root-cause analysis.

• Ensure on-time, defect-free delivery and teams’ adherence to Penske IT governance, architectural standards, security practices, and licensing compliance.

• Identify opportunities to simplify systems, optimize processes, and enable new business capabilities by challenging the status quo.

• Provide regular updates to leadership on progress, risks, and outcomes.

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