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SDLC in the AI Era
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Engineering Manager

The job covers measuring AI impact, tool spend and junior growth

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How your work changes

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Open any item to see before and now, with sources.

Risks to watch

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Skills to build

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Human skills: what's new, what matters more, and what AI now does for you.

New skillsDidn't really exist in the role before
  • Measuring AI utilization, impact and cost together
  • Tracking and forecasting AI tool spend
  • Writing and communicating a team AI policy
  • Interviewing candidates who use AI tools
  • Designing learning work for juniors that AI no longer covers
More important nowExisting skills that AI makes more valuable
  • Coaching and mentoring
  • Setting baselines before a change
  • Investing in testing and review safety nets
  • Hands-on familiarity with the team's tools
  • Explaining return on investment to finance and leadership
Less centralStill useful, but AI now does much of it
  • Counting lines of code or commits as a productivity signal
  • Algorithm-only interview screens
  • Planning the tooling budget as seat licences alone

Tools

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"Start here" tools are the editor's pick of where to begin for this role. Our suggestion

Start here

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Your first steps

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Our suggestion
Show 3 more steps
A week in this role now

A typical week now includes more time on how the team works with AI, not just what it ships. You might look at adoption and spend alongside the usual delivery metrics, then ask in one-to-ones where the tools help and where reviewing their output slows people down. Pull requests may arrive faster and larger, so part of the week goes to checking that tests, review load and release checks are keeping up, and to pushing back when a spike in throughput comes with more incidents.

The people side has not shrunk. Hiring loops need updating so candidates can show judgement with AI tools, and junior engineers need deliberate work that builds the experience easy tasks used to provide. Budget conversations are more frequent, and it helps to have a baseline and realistic expectations ready before someone asks whether the tools are paying off. Spending some time using the same agents your team uses keeps those conversations grounded.

Agent Skills

AI instructions to copy

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Each one is a text file (SKILL.md) that tells an AI tool, step by step, how to do one task the way you want. Copy it into a chat, or add it to a tool that supports Agent Skills. Which tools, and how

Starter instructions for this role

Our suggestion

Written from the changes above. Read and adapt one before you use it.

Published skills you can reuse(2)From public skill catalogs. Check the license before use.

Related roles

Sources (8)

3 surveys, 2 vendor pages, 2 practitioner articles, 1 news article · 4 vendor-affiliated

Each source is labelled by what the page is and whether its publisher sells in this space. How we label sources

  1. 1.
    Announcing the 2025 DORA Report(opens in new tab)

    Google Cloud (Nathen Harvey and Derek DeBellis) · 23 September 2025

    SurveyVendor-affiliated

    “However, AI adoption does continue to have a negative relationship with software delivery stability.”
  2. 2.
    New DORA Report Claims Strong Engineering Foundations Drive AI Return on Investment(opens in new tab)

    InfoQ (Matt Saunders) · 11 May 2026

    News

    “The report strongly discourages headcount reduction as a strategy, arguing that retaining and training existing staff is more cost-effective and preserves institutional knowledge.”
  3. 3.
    AI measurement framework: Complete guide for engineering leaders(opens in new tab)

    DX (Taylor Bruneaux) · 20 May 2026

    Vendor pageVendor-affiliated

    “treat agents as extensions of the developers and teams that oversee their work”
  4. 4.
    How tech companies measure the impact of AI on software development(opens in new tab)

    The Pragmatic Engineer (Gergely Orosz and Laura Tacho) · 16 September 2025

    PractitionerVendor-affiliated

    “Track metrics that keep each other in check.”
  5. 5.
    AI Tooling for Software Engineers in 2026(opens in new tab)

    The Pragmatic Engineer (Gergely Orosz and Elin Nilsson) · 3 March 2026

    Survey

    “It seems like enterprise procurement, not individual preference, is behind this divergence.”
  6. 6.
    The Engineering Leadership Report 2026(opens in new tab)

    LeadDev

    SurveyVendor-affiliated

    “84% believe AI will make it harder for junior developers to enter and grow in the profession”
  7. 7.
    Who will be the senior engineers of 2035?(opens in new tab)

    The Engineering Manager (James Stanier) · 13 April 2026

    Practitioner

    “Frame it as risk mitigation, not charity.”
  8. 8.
    Yes, You Can Use AI in Our Interviews. In fact, we insist(opens in new tab)

    Canva Engineering (Simon Newton) · 11 June 2025

    Vendor page

    “We've piloted a new competency we called 'AI-Assisted Coding' that replaces our traditional Computer Science Fundamentals screening for backend and frontend engineering roles.”