
You are the Engineering Manager for a digital operations platform at an energy company. A critical release is slipping, and leadership wants the team to absorb the delay by cutting testing, deferring refactoring, and pushing the engineers to work longer hours. At the same time, two senior engineers are already showing signs of burnout, and the codebase has a growing number of fragile integrations that could create operational issues if quality slips further. You need to keep the business moving without damaging team morale or creating a larger technical debt problem.