Engineering Manager

About The Engagement You will be embedded with our anchor CPA firm client, leading their IT engineering function and reporting directly into senior technology leadership. You remain a ForgePath employee with full ForgePath benefits and career development. This is a player-coach role. Roughly half your time is hands-on engineering and architecture across the firm’s IT stack — automation, networking, cloud, endpoints, servers. The other half is leading and developing the engineering team: sitting beside a junior engineer to walk through firewall configuration, reviewing work, setting team direction, and translating between the engineering bench and the firm’s senior leadership. Employment: Full-time, W-2 ForgePath employee

Location:
Hybrid; must be able to maintain a meaningful in-person presence in Winchester, VA Reports to: Direct line into the client’s Chief Technology & Information Officer; ForgePath manages employment and career development Responsibilities Leadership and team development (~50%)
• Lead the client’s IT engineering team; mentor and develop engineers through real work
• Set technical direction and standards for the team’s day-to-day operations
• Communicate clearly upward to the CTIO and practice leads — status, tradeoffs, recommendations in business language
• Champion practical AI adoption: get the team excited about AI, model thoughtful use, push the firm to use AI as a force-multiplier
• Help shape engineering practices, review culture, and on-call expectations Hands-on engineering (~50%)
• Architect and build automation tooling and workflows that improve how the firm’s IT operates
• Engineer infrastructure improvements across the Microsoft cloud (Azure, Entra ID, Intune, Microsoft 365)
• Design and implement networking changes — firewalls, switches, segmentation
• Operate confidently across endpoints, servers, and cloud
• Bring sensible security awareness to everything you ship Required Experience
• 7+ years in IT engineering, infrastructure, or platform work, with prior team leadership (formal or informal)
• Broad and current technical fluency across: Microsoft cloud (Azure, Entra ID, Intune, Microsoft 365), networking (firewalls, switches), endpoints, servers, and automation
• Strong PowerShell or comparable scripting; comfortable building automation end-to-end
• Demonstrable mentorship history — engineers you have measurably made better
• Confident communicating with senior leadership; able to translate technical decisions into business language
• Sound baseline security awareness — you do not need to be a security specialist, but you should not need it explained to you either Preferred Experience
• Genuine AI enthusiasm and practical use of AI tools (LLMs, agentic workflows, automation copilots) in your own work
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Bicep, ARM)
• CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps)
• Experience in regulated environments (financial services, professional services, healthcare)
• Prior IT manager or engineering manager experience in a mid-market firm Compensation
• Base salary $125,000–$135,000, commensurate with experience
• Full

benefits:
medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) with employer match
• Paid time off and ForgePath-supported professional development