Software Engineering Manager | Greater Indianapolis Area
I’m Nathan Rathbun, a Software Engineering Manager with a background in software development, international business and project management. I’m an optimistic, goal-oriented leader and a clear, thoughtful communicator with extensive experience building and supporting diverse, distributed teams.
My career in the tech industry has spanned multiple sectors, including automotive and online ordering, where I’ve developed my leadership style and consistently delivered strong results. I’ve built payment processing and delivery integrations, managed distributed development teams and led complex initiatives from early planning through production delivery. I bring steady, positive energy to every team I join and pride myself on putting people first, serving as both a leader and an advocate.
Beyond technical execution and management, I’m deeply committed to fostering inclusion, creativity and a culture of results. I’ve worked in environments ranging from large enterprises to fast-moving startups, collaborating with teams across the globe. Time and again, I’ve seen that when motivated, talented people are paired with interesting problems, great things happen. My background as a language teacher and Japanese speaker has further strengthened my ability to connect, communicate and collaborate across cultures and time zones.
My focus is on building strong teams, developing people and delivering reliable, high-quality software. In my current role, I lead and support four high-performing teams of 24 software and QA engineers, overseeing the full SDLC, including planning, design, development, testing and deployment. I foster a collaborative, inclusive and growth-minded environment rooted in clear goal-setting, continuous feedback and thoughtful experimentation. I’ve successfully hired, onboarded and mentored multiple engineers, while partnering with leadership on broader recruiting efforts across the organization.
I’ve spearheaded the integration of a business-critical application into a larger software ecosystem and led the technical execution of its first external client launches. This included directing the migration of the application to my company’s infrastructure, improving performance, scalability and security. I place a strong emphasis on clarity and sustainability, developing comprehensive architecture and workflow documentation that has improved knowledge transfer, accelerated onboarding and strengthened team fluency and ownership of the system.
I champion the adoption of AI-assisted development across my teams, incorporating AI throughout the SDLC to improve productivity, accelerate problem resolution and streamline workflows. I encourage practical, thoughtful use of AI in bug diagnosis, architectural design, requirements analysis, effort estimation, code generation, code reviews, documentation and automation.
I remain deeply engaged in technical and architectural discussions, collaborating closely with senior engineers, engineering leadership and cross-functional partners to design scalable, maintainable solutions. I work hands-on with teams to resolve complex challenges, drive continuous improvement and uphold high engineering standards through thoughtful code reviews and best practices. Above all, I focus on removing obstacles, aligning work with meaningful outcomes and creating the conditions where engineers can do their best work.
I’ve written production code in C# and JavaScript, worked extensively with SQL and MongoDB, and developed systems on both Azure and AWS. My experience includes end-to-end API integrations with payment processors, point-of-sale systems, DoorDash and other delivery platforms, as well as migrations from monolithic architectures to microservices.
I’ve leveraged AI-assisted tools and autonomous coding agents for bug diagnosis, effort estimation, documentation and architectural prototyping. I recently played a key technical role in an AI-first initiative to rebuild an enterprise application from the ground up, contributing code and guiding AI agents in generating substantial portions of the new codebase. I served as both a subject matter expert and architectural contributor, translating deep product knowledge into the design and implementation of its modernized replacement.
