Software Development Manager

Job title
Software Development Manager
Company
Topdeta
Location
Pune, Maharashtra, India (Remote — Pune-based candidates preferred)
Workplace type
Remote
Employment type
Full-time
Job description
Topdeta builds hard, machine-verified coding and reasoning tasks — benchmarks, RL environments, RLVR datasets, and agentic evals — used by frontier AI labs to train and test their models. Every task is machine-verified, so a passing score is always real.
We're a startup working primarily with a distributed team of freelance/contract engineers. We're looking for a Software Development Manager to lead and coordinate this team, own delivery of our task-building pipeline, and help us scale a high-quality, reliable contributor base. You'll report directly to the founder.
Key Responsibilities
3+ years of software engineering experience, with practical understanding of software development and engineering workflows
2+ years of experience in a software engineering management, team lead, or people-management role
Demonstrated experience managing engineers and owning team delivery, performance, and day-to-day execution
Strong managerial, organizational, communication, and people-management skills; able to lead a distributed team effectively
Good technical understanding of software development, architecture, testing, Git, and development practices; hands-on coding is not the primary focus of this role
Ability to understand technical discussions, review engineering work, ask the right questions, and make sound delivery and resource decisions
Excellent problem-solving and communication skills — especially async/written, given a distributed freelance team
Ability to vet, mentor, motivate, and get the best out of freelance engineers quickly
Experience with project planning, prioritization, performance management, and stakeholder coordination
Requirements
Experience handling the end-to-end hiring process for software developers — defining requirements, sourcing, evaluating, selecting, and building a reliable engineering team
Strong ability to develop strategies, processes, and SOPs for software development and team management, with a focus on scalable, repeatable systems
Proven ability to build and hyper-scale a high-quality freelancer/contractor engineering base, including talent identification, evaluation, onboarding, and contributor quality management
Strong proficiency in at least one: TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, Java, or C++
Experience working with large production codebases
Strong knowledge of software architecture, testing, Git, and development practices
Good to Have
Prior experience managing a freelancer/contractor-based engineering team
Open-source contribution or maintenance experience
Experience with Docker, CI/CD, and cloud technologies
Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, data pipelines, or eval/benchmark systems
Shift
10:00 AM – 7:00 PM
Compensation
To be discussed based on interview performance

Work arrangement
Yes