Engineering Manager, Admin and CORE Platforms

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Engineering Manager, Admin and CORE Platforms, Kanpla

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ABOUT KANPLA

We build the platform that powers contract catering across Europe and the US. We're a fast-growing scaleup with an ambitious, energetic engineering team working to reshape the contract catering industry. Our products help serve food at over 5,000 locations to more than half a million users, and we have offices in Aarhus, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, and Philadelphia, plus many teammates working remotely across Europe.

ABOUT THE TEAMS

You'll manage two teams from day one: Admin and CORE.

Admin is Kanpla's back office: a high-stakes, versatile system that kitchen chefs and account managers at our customers rely on to set up and run everything: menus, pricing, orders, and the day-to-day configuration that makes the rest of Kanpla work. It's built to flex to each provider's specific setup, with multiple configurations, integrations, and operational models, while cutting down the time our customers spend on admin rather than adding to it. Get it right and our customers run their operations smoothly. Get it wrong and everything downstream feels it.

CORE owns the shared foundation underneath all of it: the data model, the core services, and the ordering pipeline that every other team builds on. It's the team everyone else depends on, which makes prioritisation and capacity genuinely hard and genuinely important.

Two teams, two very different kinds of pressure. One is breadth and configurability; the other is depth and being the dependency in everyone's critical path.

WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS

We don't have a real engineering management layer yet. People leadership has effectively run through Product Managers and through senior engineers who were already carrying full technical ownership. That has three costs we can name clearly:

\* Engineers don't have a clear path to grow, take on more ownership, or get honest feedback on their performance.

\* Too many decisions bottleneck in one place, and cross-team initiatives fall between chairs.

\* Our current model scales for maybe one or two more hires per team before someone is responsible for seven-plus people and the technical direction.

This is one of the first two dedicated Engineering Manager roles at Kanpla, and the first hired externally. We're hiring it before the pain hits rather than after, so the person in it gets to build the function properly instead of firefighting it.

WHAT THIS ROLE IS, AND WHAT IT ISN'T

We're being deliberate about the split, because we've seen the alternative and it doesn't work.

This role is: people and capacity ownership. Growth, performance, feedback, staffing, hiring, and making sure your teams can run without waiting on approvals.

This is a player-coach role, not a pure manager. Expect to stay hands-on around 20–30% of your time: pairing, reviews, the occasional small piece of work. Never on the critical path. You should be able to read the code and hold a real design conversation, because that's how you'll earn the respect of strong senior engineers.

This role isn't: the team's technical decision-maker of record. Deep technical ownership of each domain sits with the senior engineers on the IC track, and you'll partner with them rather than outrank them on architecture. You also won't be leading individual projects from a technical perspective.

If what you actually want is to own architecture and ship features as your primary contribution, this is the wrong role and we'd rather tell you now.

WHAT YOU'LL FOCUS ON

\* Manage the engineers on Admin and CORE: regular one-on-ones, career growth plans, and direct, useful performance feedback. Engineers on both teams report to you for growth and performance.

\* Own capacity and staffing across both teams: who's working on what, where we're thin, and what we do about it.