Engineering Manager

Описание вакансии

\* Partner with the Product Managers on delivery, sequencing, and trade-offs, and with the senior engineers on scoping and quality.

\* Partner with other EMs on cross-team initiatives and collaboration.

\* Help define and grow technical leadership on the IC track. Our career framework is being built this autumn, and you'll shape how technical leadership works here rather than inheriting someone else's version of it.

\* Hire. You'll shape and run hiring for your teams as we grow.

\* Remove bottlenecks: fewer decisions routed upward, more teams that can run themselves.

\* Help build our career framework. We're putting the first proper version together this autumn, aiming for "good enough, safe enough to try" rather than perfect, and you'll have real input into it.

BEING STRAIGHT ABOUT THE STAGE WE'RE AT

We're mid-way through defining our engineering structure, and we'd rather you know that going in.

\* The IC and management tracks are being separated properly right now. You'll help finish that work rather than inherit a finished version of it.

\* Our teams are currently sliced by product surface (Admin, CORE, POS, app). Over the next year we're moving toward teams that own a full customer journey end to end, organised by customer segment: hospitality, schools, and so on. Your scope will shift as that happens.

\* We care much more about someone who recognises these problems and wants to solve them than about someone matching a title on a ladder we haven't finished drawing.

THE PRACTICAL DETAILS

\* You'll manage: the Admin and CORE teams, roughly 10 engineers on day one across both.

\* You'll report to: the VP of Engineering.

\* You'll work with: a Product Manager on each team, our design team, and the other Engineering Manager (covering POS and app).

\* Process: intro call → technical and leadership deep-dive → team meeting → offer

OUR CURRENT STACK

You won't be the primary architect, but you do need to be able to hold a real technical conversation and read the code.

\* Languages: TypeScript-first across the stack.

\* Frontend: Next.js and related React tooling.

\* Backend & data: Node.js services, Firestore as the primary operational database, PostgreSQL as our analytical store.

\* Cloud: GCP (Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Functions, Firestore, Cloud Storage).

\* CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Vercel, container pipelines.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Must-haves

\* Experience managing a team of engineers, including the parts people avoid: performance conversations, growth plans, and honest feedback.

\* Genuine motivation for people management. You measure your work by what your team ships and how your engineers develop, not by your own commits.

\* Technically credible with a hands-on engineering background, ideally in TypeScript/Node.js. You can review a design, challenge a plan, and contribute to a project definition.

\* Comfortable operating without a playbook. We don't have a mature EM function, a finished career ladder, or a settled team topology. You'll help write all three.

\* A track record of partnering closely with Product, and of pushing back well when scope and capacity don't match.

\* Excellent communicator across a distributed team in several countries.

\* Thrives in a growing scaleup: pragmatic, autonomous, low ego.

Nice to have

\* Experience establishing an EM function or management layer where there wasn't one before.

\* Experience coaching senior engineers into technical leadership, and keeping the IC track a genuinely attractive option.

\* Background with highly configurable, multi-tenant back-office or admin systems, with many integration points and configuration paths.

\* Experience with GCP (Firestore, Cloud Run, or similar managed services).