Software Development Manager, Design Systems- Hybrid, Cary, North Carolina or Remote in EST time zone
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About the job
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.
As a Software Development Manager, Design System, you will:
- 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.
Required qualifications
- 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 above qualifications.
Additional competencies, knowledge and skills
- Strategic Planning – Obtaining information and identifying key issues and relationships relevant to achieving a long-range goal; committing to a course of action to accomplish a long-range goal after developing alternatives based on logical assumptions, facts, available resources, constraints, and organizational values.
- Creating a Culture of Trust – Fostering a work environment that encourages people to act with integrity and treat each other and their ideas with respect; creating and protecting a high-trust environment by setting an example, advocating for others in the face of challenges, removing barriers to trust, and rewarding others for demonstrating behaviors that cultivate trust. Provides feedback both reinforcing and constructive regarding the behaviors of his/her managers.
- Leading Change – Driving organizational and cultural changes needed to achieve strategic objectives; catalyzing new approaches to improve results by transforming organizational culture, systems, or products/services; helping others overcome resistance to change.
- Familiarity with content management systems and how design system components integrate with CMS platforms, as well as responsive design, progressive enhancement, and cross‑browser compatibility.
- Experience with design tokens, theming systems, and CSS architecture patterns, particularly in UI‑intensive product development.
- Experience with engineering metrics and reporting tools (e.g., Jira, Confluence).
- Familiarity with design‑to‑development handoff workflows and tools (Figma, Storybook).
World-class benefits
Highlights include...
- Comprehensive medical, prescription, dental and vision plans.
- Medical plan options include:
- PPO with low annual deductible and copays.
- HDHP combined with a health savings account with a contribution from SAS (no access to on-site health care center).
- Onsite Health Care Center (HQ) that’s free to employees and family members enrolled in the PPO plan. There's a pharmacy too! Not local to HQ? The pharmacy will ship prescriptions for no additional charge!
- An industry-leading 401k plan.
- Tuition Assistance Program and programs and resources to support your development
- Generous time away including vacation time, a variety of paid holidays, and our much-loved U.S. Winter Wellness Break between December 25 and January 1.
- Volunteer Time Off, parental leave and unlimited paid sick days.
- Generous childcare benefits for all full-time employees.
You are welcome here.
At SAS, it’s not about fitting into our culture – it’s about adding to it. We believe our people make the difference. Our inclusive workforce brings together unique talents and inspires teams to create amazing software that reflects the diversity of our users and customers.
Additional Information:
To qualify, applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States, and should not require, now or in the future, sponsorship for employment visa status. SAS is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to any characteristic protected by law. Read more: Know Your Rights.
Resumes may be considered in the order they are received. SAS employees performing certain job functions may require access to technology or software subject to export or import regulations. To comply with these regulations, SAS may obtain nationality or citizenship information from applicants for employment. SAS collects this information solely for trade law compliance purposes and does not use it to discriminate unfairly in the hiring process.
SAS only sends emails from verified “sas.com” email addresses and never asks for sensitive, personal information or money. If you have any doubts about the authenticity of any type of communication from, or on behalf of SAS, please contact Recruitingsupport@sas.com.
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