Senior Manager, Software Engineering - Global Forwarding Technology

About the job

C.H. Robinson is seeking a Senior Manager, Software Engineering, to join our Global Forwarding team as we continue to expand our strategic technology portfolio and engineering capabilities. In this leadership role, you will provide day-to-day direction for engineering teams, develop and mentor technical talent, and partner closely with product, business, and technology leaders to deliver innovative solutions that drive business impact. You will be responsible for leading high-performing engineering teams that design, build, and support complex software solutions across our application platforms, while also integrating third-party technologies into our broader technology ecosystem. As a strategic and forward-thinking leader, you will help shape the engineering roadmap, drive modernization and automation initiatives, and champion the adoption of AI-driven solutions to improve efficiency, scalability, and customer outcomes.

The ideal candidate is a proven people leader and technical bar raiser who fosters a culture of innovation, engineering excellence, and continuous improvement. You bring a strong understanding of automation, AI technologies, and modern software engineering practices, coupled with the ability to align technical strategies with business objectives and deliver results in a fast-paced, global environment.

This role can be based only in MN, IL or Kansas City

• DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
• The duties and responsibilities of this position consist of, but are not limited to, the following:
• Partner with product, business, operations, and technology leaders to define strategy across Global Forwarding capabilities and ensure engineering teams are aligned to the highest-value business outcomes
• Lead engineering teams responsible for modernizing and automating complex Global Forwarding workflows across areas such as pricing and rating, carrier contracts, shipment planning and execution, booking, visibility, documents, and operational workflows
• Collaborate with cross-functional leaders to move opportunities from discovery through delivery and into production, balancing speed, scalability, technical quality, and business value
• Identify opportunities to apply automation, AI, large language models, and agentic technologies to reduce manual work, improve decision-making, and create more scalable Global Forwarding operations
• Partner with senior engineers and architects to establish practical patterns for AI-enabled workflows, including human-in-the-loop design, evaluation, observability, security, governance, and appropriate guardrails
• Encourage teams to experiment with emerging technologies and AI-assisted development tools while maintaining strong engineering discipline, production readiness, and measurable business outcomes
• Help define product and technology vision in the context of established Global Forwarding business goals and evolving strategic opportunities
• Build and maintain technology roadmaps that connect engineering investments to measurable business outcomes
• Define and communicate technical and organizational strategy while ensuring product stability, scalability, reliability, and security
• Lead teams through ambiguity and evolving priorities, helping translate broad business opportunities into clear engineering objectives and incremental delivery plans
• Work across Technology teams and domains to recruit expertise, resolve dependencies, remove roadblocks, and prevent duplication of capabilities
• Drive reuse of common platforms, services, patterns, and automation capabilities across the Global Forwarding technology ecosystem
• Identify additional technical resource needs across teams and raise awareness early to support timely delivery and realization of value
• Balance investment between new strategic capabilities, modernization, technical debt reduction, production health, and ongoing business commitments
• Manage disputes and competing priorities between technical teams to maintain progress against shared goals
• Build and maintain technology product roadmaps with an emphasis on repeatable, scalable, secure solutions, continuous improvement, and speed of delivery
• Manage escalated technical and operational issues and ensure appropriate ownership and resolution
• Engage and assist other teams in high-priority incidents
• Follow enterprise goals around HPIs and critical/major outages
• Address production issues with a sense of urgency while driving systemic improvements that reduce recurrence
• Ensure teams meet quarterly commitments while maintaining flexibility to respond to changing business priorities
• Ensure defects and production issues are resolved within identified levels of service
• Establish strong engineering practices around architecture, testing, observability, security, reliability, and software delivery
• Encourage creativity, experimentation, and collaboration without organizational boundaries while maintaining accountability for delivery
• Establish, maintain, and communicate clear measures that quantify progress against goals and objectives through effective presentations, scorecards, and business outcome reporting
• Partner with business stakeholders to connect committed technical work to business outcomes and communicate the impact of delivered capabilities
• Represent engineering strategy, progress, risks, and tradeoffs effectively with senior leadership audiences
• Build strong relationships across Global Forwarding, enterprise technology, and adjacent technology organizations to support cross-domain initiatives and shared capabilities
• Team Leadership
• Partners with Talent Acquisition to establish a pipeline, recruit, select, and onboard qualified and diverse engineering talent
• Builds leadership depth and succession plans across the organization, developing engineers and emerging leaders who can take on broader technical and people leadership responsibilities
• Manages annual merit programs for assigned teams to align compensation with performance results
• Builds a deep understanding of the skills, strengths, development areas, and career aspirations across the team
• Aligns team members’ strengths and interests with organizational needs and commits to consistently providing feedback, development opportunities, coaching, and recognition
• Creates opportunities for senior engineers to lead complex technical initiatives, influence architecture, mentor others, and operate across team boundaries
• Develops teams capable of operating with increasing autonomy while maintaining clear accountability and alignment to strategic priorities
• Aligns team performance to C.H. Robinson’s strategic objectives and cascades communication on divisional and organizational initiatives to ensure employee understanding and alignment
• Works with the Director to establish clear team goals and works with leaders and individual contributors to establish goals that tie back to broader business and technology outcomes
• Encourages employee feedback through formal and informal channels and takes action on feedback to drive a trusting culture of open two-way communication, inclusivity, and continuous improvement
• Creates an environment where engineers are encouraged to challenge assumptions, experiment with new technologies, and identify better ways to automate and scale the business
• Evaluates resource needs across teams and makes recommendations that balance strategic opportunity, delivery timelines, technical risk, and cost effectiveness
• Leads organizational change thoughtfully, including team growth, shifting responsibilities, new capability development, and evolving operating models
• Coaches teams through complex business and technical domains, helping them move from dependency on a small number of experts toward broader organizational knowledge and ownership

• Required Qualifications:
• 7 +years of experience working on a software engineering team progressing in complexity and responsibility
• 4+ years of experience leading and managing software engineering teams
• Experience delivering business-critical software functionality in complex enterprise environments
• Experience leading software delivery in an agile or product-oriented environment
• Experience managing systems integrations, distributed systems, APIs, and interactions between custom and commercial technologies
• Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams through ambiguity, complex dependencies, and changing priorities
• Experience partnering with product, business, architecture, and operations leaders to shape strategy and delivery
• Experience communicating status, technical tradeoffs, risks, and strategy to senior leadership audiences
• Demonstrated ability to connect engineering investments and technical decisions to business outcomes
• Proven ability to develop engineers, technical leaders, and emerging people leaders
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, architecture, testing, reliability, security, and software delivery
• Bachelor’s degree or a minimum of 4 years of equivalent work experience and a high school diploma/GED

• Preferred Qualifications:
• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, Business, or related field
• Experience with ERP, TMS, freight forwarding, supply chain management, transportation, or other complex operational systems
• Experience leading teams that build highly automated, high-volume transactional workflows
• Experience applying generative AI, large language models, intelligent automation, or agentic technologies to business workflows
• Experience leading teams experimenting with or deploying AI-powered applications, including tool/function calling, retrieval-augmented generation, workflow orchestration, intelligent agents, or AI-assisted decision support
• Understanding of enterprise AI considerations including evaluation, observability, security, privacy, governance, human oversight, and responsible deployment
• Experience using AI-assisted software development and agentic engineering tools to improve developer productivity and delivery speed
• Experience leading modernization of legacy platforms while maintaining critical business continuity
• Experience with architectural concepts such as Domain Driven Design, event-driven architecture, distributed systems, APIs, and SOLID principles
• Experience with cloud-native architecture and platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP
• Experience working in a product-led organization and applying lean principles to product development
• Strong strategic orientation, business acumen, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills with the ability to evaluate broad organizational and technical impacts
• Demonstrated ability to create an environment that encourages innovation while maintaining accountability for production quality and delivery
• Effective and flexible communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical and business concepts in a clear and relatable way
• Strong interpersonal skills including the ability to build trust, influence, and foster relationships across diverse teams and functions
• Demonstrated experience consulting, influencing without authority, negotiating, resolving conflict, and escalating when necessary
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, decentralized, matrixed, global environment
• Excellent organizational, planning, and execution skills with the ability to manage multiple competing, high-priority initiatives
• Ability to lead, motivate, and inspire cross-functional and globally distributed teams
• Ability to connect the work teams are doing to strategic business priorities and measurable outcomes
• Experience leading through organizational and technology change
• Growth mindset with demonstrated experience giving and receiving feedback
• Ability to motivate and encourage change and drive positive outcomes in a large, dispersed organization
• Ability to travel up to 10% domestically and internationally
• Values a diverse and inclusive work environment

We will review applications for this role on an ongoing basis and encourage all interested candidates to apply at their earliest convenience.

Compensation Range
$127,500.00 - $295,900.00
The base pay range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum base pay for the position across all U.S. locations. Your individual base pay within this range is determined by work location, which takes into account geographic cost of labor, and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base pay only and do not include additional variable compensation.

Questioning if you meet the mark? Studies have shown that some individuals may be less likely to apply unless they match the job description exactly. Here at C.H. Robinson, we’re building an inclusive workplace where all employees feel they belong. If this position excites you, we welcome you to apply whether you check all the preferred qualifications or just a few. You may just be our next great fit!

Equal Opportunity
C.H. Robinson is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to a workplace and performance culture that reflects the strengths of our worldwide marketplace. We value unique experiences and diverse backgrounds of our people within our company, our business relationships, and our communities. We’re committed to providing an inclusive environment, free from harassment and discrimination, where all employees feel welcomed, valued and respected.

EOE\Disabled\Veteran

• Benefits
• Your Health, Wealth and Self
• Your total wellbeing is the foundation of our business, and our benefits support your financial, family and personal goals. We provide the top-tier benefits that matter to you most, including:
• Three medical plans which include

• • Prescription drug coverage

• Enhanced Fertility benefits

• Flexible Spending Accounts

• Health Savings Account (including employer contribution)

• Dental and Vision

• Basic and Supplemental Life Insurance

• Short-Term and Long-Term Disability

• Paid observed holidays

• 2 paid floating holidays for U.S. hourly employees

• Flexible Time Off (FTO) offered to U.S. salaried employees — no accruals and no caps. Paid Time Off (PTO) offered to all other employees in the U.S. and Canada

• Paid parental leave

• Paid time off to volunteer in your community

• Charitable Giving Match Program

• 401(k) with 6% company matching

• Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• Plus a broad range of career development, networking, and team-building opportunities

Learn more about our benefit offerings on our BENEFITS & WELLBEING page