Software Engineering Manager, Associate Portal

Information Technology

As the Software Engineering Manager for our Associate Portal, you will lead the engineering team responsible for building and operating Ecolab's enterprise digital front door on ServiceNow Employee Center Pro within HR Service Delivery. You will own the quality, reliability, and technical delivery of an experience that helps associates find information, access services, complete tasks, and connect to enterprise workflows from one place.

This is a hands-on engineering leadership role. You will lead the team and stay close to the work: shaping solutions, reviewing designs and code, removing delivery barriers, and ensuring what reaches production is secure, scalable, accessible, and supportable. You will establish the engineering practices that make quality repeatable rather than dependent on individual projects or implementation partners.

You will partner closely with product, UX, architecture, Enterprise AI, HR, Communications, and business teams. You will translate the Associate Portal vision into an executable engineering roadmap and build the internal capability needed to operate and continuously improve the product after implementation.

What you will do

Engineering Leadership and Team Development

·    Lead, mentor, and grow a team of ServiceNow engineers and technical leads responsible for the Associate Portal and related employee experience capabilities.

·    Establish clear ownership, performance expectations, development plans, and engineering objectives for the team.

·    Build a culture of accountability, technical excellence, collaboration, continuous improvement, and strong customer focus.

·    Manage work across employees, contingent resources, and implementation partners while retaining clear internal accountability for engineering outcomes.

·    Develop the internal knowledge and capability required to own, operate, and enhance the portal following implementation and knowledge transfer.

Associate Portal Engineering

·    Own engineering delivery for the Associate Portal built on ServiceNow Employee Center Pro and HR Service Delivery.

·    Lead the configuration, development, testing, deployment, and enhancement of portal pages, widgets, microsites, application launchers, navigation, taxonomy, and responsive experiences.

·    Ensure a consistent, intuitive, and consumer-grade experience across desktop, mobile, manufacturing, field, and corporate environments.

·    Guide the use of audience groups, user criteria, HR criteria, personas, roles, regions, and language preferences to deliver relevant and personalized experiences.

·    Oversee capabilities including enterprise search, knowledge, content, services, requests, approvals, tasks, communications, and conversational assistance.

·    Partner with UX leaders to ensure implemented experiences match approved designs and meet accessibility, usability, and performance expectations.

Architecture and Technical Governance

·    Partner with ServiceNow platform architecture and enterprise architecture to define and enforce technical standards for the Associate Portal.

·    Translate complex business and experience requirements into secure, scalable, maintainable, and upgrade-friendly ServiceNow solutions.

·    Apply a configuration-first approach and ensure custom development is used only where it creates clear business or experience value.

·    Lead technical design reviews covering portal components, integrations, data flows, security, performance, and cross-platform dependencies.

·    Maintain clear solution designs, integration specifications, data flows, operational documentation, and technical decision records.

·    Actively manage customization risk, technical debt, unsupported components, platform upgrades, and lifecycle dependencies.

Software Engineering Standards and Quality

·    Establish and enforce standards for coding, peer review, source control, testing, documentation, deployment, and release management.

·    Ensure solutions are designed for maintainability, reusability, security, performance, accessibility, and platform upgrades.

·    Drive automated testing using ServiceNow Automated Test Framework and other approved testing capabilities.

·    Implement quality gates across development, system integration testing, user acceptance testing, regression testing, and production deployment.

·    Lead disciplined defect management, root-cause analysis, corrective action, and technical debt reduction.

·    Ensure delivery partners meet Ecolab engineering, security, documentation, and quality standards before work is accepted.

Agile Delivery and Execution

·    Partner with Product Management and the Product Owner to translate roadmap priorities, user needs, and approved designs into an executable engineering backlog.

·    Lead estimation, backlog refinement, sprint planning, dependency management, release planning, and delivery reviews.

·    Ensure commitments reflect clear requirements, realistic estimates, available capacity, technical dependencies, and quality expectations.

·    Coordinate delivery across portal development, UX, integrations, content, search, AI, testing, deployment, hypercare, and ongoing support.

·    Communicate delivery status, technical risks, decisions, and blockers early, with clear ownership and a practical path to resolution.

Integrations and Enterprise Experience

·    Oversee integrations supporting employee data, content, services, requests, approvals, search, digital assets, communications, analytics, and workflow execution.

·    Define reusable integration patterns using IntegrationHub, REST and SOAP APIs, MID Servers, and other approved enterprise technologies.

·    Partner with system owners to define interface ownership, data contracts, security, monitoring, exception handling, and support responsibilities.

·    Ensure integrations are observable, resilient, loosely coupled, and designed so failures do not become recurring user experience issues.

·    Provide technical oversight for integrations with platforms such as Workday, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Viva Engage, enterprise content systems, and digital asset platforms.

AI, Search, and Automation

·    Partner with Enterprise AI and platform teams to integrate conversational assistance, enterprise search, knowledge-grounded responses, and task automation into the portal.

·    Provide engineering leadership for the portal-side integration and presentation of EVA and other approved AI capabilities.

·    Ensure AI and search capabilities meet enterprise requirements for security, privacy, governance, performance, observability, and supportability.

·    Evaluate ServiceNow AI Search, Now Assist, Virtual Agent, and automation capabilities where they improve associate outcomes and align with platform strategy.

Content, Knowledge, and Experience Governance

·    Partner with content and business leaders to implement capabilities for content creation, approval, publishing, personalization, localization, lifecycle management, and archival.

·    Provide engineering oversight for ServiceNow Knowledge Management, content experiences, searchability, metadata, and audience targeting.

·    Establish clear technical ownership for templates, components, microsites, navigation structures, taxonomies, and reusable portal capabilities.

·    Use analytics, user feedback, defects, and operational data with Product and UX teams to continuously improve the experience.

Reliability and Operations

·    Own engineering outcomes for portal availability, performance, stability, security, scalability, and maintainability.

·    Define monitoring, alerting, support, release, and escalation practices for the portal and its integrations.

·    Partner with platform operations and support teams to establish clear support boundaries, service expectations, and incident ownership.

·    Ensure the team is prepared to support deployments, stabilization, hypercare, upgrades, and ongoing production operations.

·    Lead proactive remediation of vulnerabilities, recurring incidents, unsupported technologies, and lifecycle risks.

Minimum Qualifications

·    Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent relevant professional experience.

·    10+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, enterprise application development, or platform engineering.

·    7+ years of hands-on ServiceNow experience spanning solution design, configuration, development, integration, testing, and production support.

·    3+ years leading software engineers, technical leads, or complex cross-functional engineering delivery teams.

·    Strong experience with ServiceNow Employee Center, Employee Center Pro, Service Portal, or comparable ServiceNow portal technologies.

·    Experience with ServiceNow HR Service Delivery, including employee experiences, HR services, knowledge, user criteria, HR criteria, and related security considerations.

·    Strong knowledge of JavaScript, Glide APIs, Flow Designer, IntegrationHub, REST and SOAP APIs, UI Builder, and ServiceNow development practices.

·    Experience delivering responsive, personalized, accessible, and high-performing user-facing enterprise applications.

·    Demonstrated experience establishing coding standards, testing practices, quality gates, architecture guardrails, and release controls.

·    Strong Agile delivery, stakeholder management, and communication skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs to executive and nontechnical audiences.

·    Proven people leadership, including coaching, performance management, capability development, and work across globally distributed teams.

Preferred Qualifications

·    ServiceNow Certified System Administrator, Certified Application Developer, or Certified Implementation Specialist in HR Service Delivery.

·    Experience implementing Employee Center Pro in a large, global enterprise.

·    Experience with ServiceNow Knowledge Management, Content Experiences, Curated Experiences, taxonomy, audience targeting, AI Search, and analytics.

·    Experience with Virtual Agent, Now Assist, generative AI, enterprise search, or conversational employee experiences.

·    Experience integrating ServiceNow with Workday, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Viva Engage, content platforms, or digital asset management solutions.

·    Experience with ServiceNow mobile capabilities, WCAG accessibility standards, multilingual experiences, and dynamic translation.

·    Experience transitioning delivery from a systems integrator to an internal product engineering and operating model.

·    Experience leading globally distributed engineering teams supporting enterprise portals, intranets, digital workplaces, or employee experience platforms.