Engineering Manager - EU

About the Role

We are searching for an Engineering Manager to join our growing European team at Ashby, located remotely in Germany. This role challenges traditional engineering management by empowering engineers to take full ownership of projects — including writing product specifications and making product decisions without excessive process constraints. You'll cultivate an innovative, high-autonomy culture that minimizes bureaucracy and maximizes engineers' capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Coach and influence engineers to independently manage broad, loosely defined projects with minimal intervention.
• Provide constructive feedback on product and technical specifications to help teams prioritize scope and improve quality.
• Remain hands-on by contributing code and debugging issues, ensuring technical skills stay sharp without blocking critical paths.
• Enhance internal systems such as data generation and simulation within demo accounts to impact multiple departments positively.
• Lead and grow direct reports, generally around six, by observing, guiding, and supporting individual performance and team culture.

Qualifications and Traits

• Passionate about both engineering leadership and technical excellence.
• Enjoy tackling management challenges like giving difficult feedback and developing performance systems.
• Skilled communicator and empathetic leader capable of navigating team dynamics and fostering belief in new approaches.
• Experience identifying and nurturing exceptional engineering talent with nuanced understanding beyond standard profiles.
• Comfortable with high-trust and high-autonomy startup environments and multiple roles.
• Prefer empowering teams to make decisions rather than controlling product outcomes yourself.

Engineering Philosophy and Culture

Ashby values minimal process to unleash creativity and ownership. Engineers run projects end-to-end: researching problems, writing specs, designing, and implementing solutions. The culture encourages learning, collaboration, and deliberate communication, with low meeting overload and dedicated focus time. We invest in developer tooling and abstraction building blocks that increase leverage and efficiency without expanding team size.

Additional Information

• Engineering leaders at Ashby maintain coding involvement while focusing on performance, culture, and operational improvements.
• Meet in person at least twice yearly as a department and company, with a budget for local meetups.
• Committed to providing an environment free from poor management experiences.
• Looking for candidates early in their leadership journey who are courageous and principled.

Who Should Consider This Role

You should apply if you love technical depth and engineering management equally, enjoy building high-performing teams, and are optimistic about creating a different engineering culture that trusts and empowers engineers. Avoid applying if you dislike coding, want to control all decision-making, or prefer rigid processes and low autonomy teams.