Life as a Senior Engineering Manager at Seamfix

There’s a question I get from engineers on my team, usually a few months after they’ve been watching me work: “So what exactly do you do all day?”

It’s a fair question. From the outside, my calendar looks like a wall of meetings. From the inside, it feels like something else entirely. This is my attempt at an honest answer.

How I got here

I didn’t set out to be a manager. Like most engineers, I set out to build things.

I’ve spent more than eight years doing exactly that, across frontend, fullstack and infrastructure roles at a handful of companies before landing at Seamfix. For most of that time my definition of a good day was simple: hard problem in the morning, working solution by evening, clean commit history in between.

Then, somewhere along the way, the problems changed shape. The bugs I cared about most stopped living in code. They lived in unclear requirements, in two teams unknowingly building the same thing, in a good engineer quietly burning out because nobody asked how they were doing. When I moved into leadership at Seamfix, it wasn’t a reward for writing more code. It was a bet that I could fix that second kind of bug too.

What a week actually looks like

On paper, my week is unremarkable. Epic reviews. Hiring interviews. One-on-ones. Planning sessions. A dashboard or two. What those things actually involve is a different matter.

Take epic reviews. Someone has broken a big idea into dozens of tickets, and my job is to walk through that plan asking uncomfortable questions before reality asks them for us. Why does this piece exist? What happens when this assumption breaks? Who gets paged at 2 a.m. if we get this wrong? An hour of honest questioning up front saves weeks of quiet rework later. Not everyone loves it in the moment, but everyone appreciates it three months down the line.

Or hiring. Right now I’m helping hire for senior infrastructure leadership, and I feel the weight of it every single time. Hire well and the whole platform gets calmer. Hire badly and you spend a year paying for one afternoon’s optimism. So I don’t ask trivia. I ask people to think out loud, to disagree with me, to tell me about the failure they still think about. You learn more from how someone handles a wrong turn than from any right answer.

In between all of that, I stay close to the platform itself. We build identity infrastructure, the kind of software where “mostly correct” is not a phrase anyone wants to hear. I may not write the most code on the team anymore, but I still read a lot of it, and I still lose sleep over the same things my engineers do.

Alignment, not authority

If I had to compress my management philosophy into one line, it would be this: I lead through alignment, not authority.

I could simply tell people what to do. My title technically allows it. But I’ve watched leaders operate that way, and the result is always the same: compliance in the room, confusion outside it, and a team that stops thinking because thinking was never required of them.

Alignment is slower and harder. It means explaining the why until it feels repetitive. It means questioning a requirement in front of the team so they learn that requirements are allowed to be questioned. It means sometimes being convinced I’m wrong, in public, because the goal was never to be right. The goal was to get everyone pointed at the same problem.

The payoff is a team that makes good decisions when I’m not in the room. Increasingly, that’s the only kind of decision-making that scales.

The part nobody warned me about

Early in this role, our CTO asked me a simple question during a check-in: “What was your win for the week?”

I answered the way any engineer would. I described something I’d shipped. He listened, then said something that has stayed with me since: “That’s not a win. That’s task completion.”

It stung a little, but he was right, and it took me a while to fully understand why. In a technical frame, finishing the thing is the win. The ticket closes, the build goes green, done. In a management frame, a win is something that changed the trajectory: a risk removed before it materialized, a team unblocked, a decision that ten other tasks now flow from. Once I understood the difference, it changed how I spend my weeks.

It also prepared me for the strangest part of this job: the feedback loop disappears.

As an engineer, you get told you’re doing well constantly. Tests pass, builds go green, features ship. Management has none of that. You can spend a week untangling a conflict between two teams, and if you do it perfectly, the result is nothing. No incident. No drama. Just work continuing as if the problem never existed. Your best days are invisible.

I’ve had to learn to find satisfaction in that. To notice the intern who now pushes back on a design with confidence they didn’t have six months ago. We run a structured intern cohort at Seamfix, and watching people grow through it has become one of the most rewarding parts of this job. To notice the meeting that didn’t need to happen because the team aligned without me. That’s the green build now. It just doesn’t come with a checkmark.

What I’d tell my past self

If I could send one message back to the version of me who was hesitating over that first leadership role, it would be this: you’re not leaving engineering. You’re changing what you engineer.

The systems I work on now are made of people, incentives and trust instead of services, queues and databases. They fail in stranger ways and recover more slowly. But the instincts transfer. Question the requirements. Design for failure. Care obsessively about the things that are hard to see.

And a second message: your calendar is not your job. The meetings are just where the job becomes visible. The real work, the alignment, the trust, the questions asked early enough to matter, happens in the spaces between.

That’s life as a senior engineering manager at Seamfix. Fewer commits, stranger bugs, and honestly, I wouldn’t trade it.

Tobi is a Senior Engineering Manager on the Platform Engineering team at Seamfix, where he works on multi-tenant identity infrastructure and spends an unreasonable amount of time asking “but why?” in planning meetings.