Software Development Manager, Design System

Software Development Manager, Design Systems
- Hybrid, Cary, North Carolina or Remote in EST time zone

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The Digital Experience organization in R&D is looking for a Software Development Manager to lead the engineering team building SAS’s newest component offering in its design system, Filament, which supports marketing and post-purchase experiences. You’ll apply your technical leadership and people management expertise to guide a team of front-end developers and SDETs in delivering scalable, performant, and accessible components that power customer-facing digital properties.

You’ll partner with Design, Product, Marketing, and the broader Filament leadership team to establish technical strategy, prioritize roadmaps, and ensure seamless design-to-development workflows. You’ll have the opportunity to make a significant impact by building engineering excellence, fostering team growth, and delivering components that serve SAS customers at global scale.

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team of front-end developers and SDETs through coaching, career development, and performance management.
• Define the technical strategy and architecture for Filament’s newest component offering, setting standards for development, testing, documentation, and scalable deployment.
• Translate design specifications into technical requirements by partnering closely with Filament designers to ensure feasibility, performance, and accessibility.
• Own sprint execution and delivery, including planning, prioritization, estimation, and balancing feature work with technical debt to maintain predictable release cycles.
• Establish and enforce engineering excellence by driving code reviews, testing standards, CI/CD practices, version control workflows, documentation quality, and accessibility compliance (WCAG).
• Collaborate across Filament engineering teams to ensure components properly extend and consume design tokens, base components, and foundational system layers.
• Manage team operations and capacity, including KPIs, resource planning, budgeting, and hiring, while fostering a culture of innovation, quality, and continuous improvement.
• Be encouraged to participate in open-source projects on behalf of SAS.
• Ensure all applicable security policies and processes are followed to support the organization’s secure software development goals.
• Embrace curiosity, passion, authenticity and accountability. These are our values and influence everything we do.

• Bachelor's degree in quantitative field, preferably computer science, math, or statistics.
• Requires a minimum of eight years of related programming or testing experience, including one year of project lead, supervisory or management experience. Eight years of professional programming or testing experience may be considered in lieu of previous management experience.
• Demonstrated mastery of modern front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), React (including meta‑frameworks like Next.js), and/or Web Components, including the ability to design, build, and optimize performant UI components.
• 5+ years leading development of component-based architectures or design system libraries at scale, including applying architectural patterns (SPA/MPA), integrating tokens/base components, and ensuring compatibility across applications.
• Demonstrated success driving accessibility compliance, enforcing engineering best practices (code reviews, testing, CI/CD, Git workflows), and partnering with Design, Product, and stakeholders to deliver high-quality solutions.
• Equivalent combination of related education, training and experience may be considered in place of the…