Engineering Manager - UK

About the Role

We are seeking an Engineering Manager for our UK-based remote team, led by Colin, Director of Engineering Europe. This role challenges traditional workflows by empowering software engineers to take ownership beyond coding—they write product specs, make product decisions, and manage projects independently without rigid processes or excessive oversight.

Our goal is to build an optimistic engineering culture that trusts engineers to drive results with less bureaucracy, enabling creativity and ownership rather than constraining roles with pessimistic processes.

Key Responsibilities

• Coach engineers by providing feedback on product and technical specs to facilitate decision-making without direct authority.
• Develop engineering talent so team members can independently manage loosely defined projects with minimal intervention.
• Participate hands-on in coding, debugging, and improving developer tools while avoiding becoming a bottleneck.
• Lead initiatives such as enhancing data generation and simulation for demo accounts that impact multiple teams.
• Focus on cultivating team culture, individual performance, and working environment rather than driving sprint planning or product decisions.

Qualifications & Desired Traits

• Passionate about both technical challenges and management responsibilities.
• Strong technical background enabling meaningful conversations across infrastructure, backend, and frontend domains.
• Skilled at giving constructive and candid feedback, even to top-performing engineers.
• Empathetic communicator adept at navigating diverse perspectives and facilitating organizational change.
• Insightful about what makes engineers exceptional, including recruitment and growth strategies with nuanced understanding.
• Prefers empowering teams to make product and technical decisions autonomously rather than directing them.
• Thrives in high-trust, high-autonomy environments typical of startups, comfortable wearing multiple hats and adapting quickly.

What We Value in Our Engineering Culture

• Minimal processes that grant engineers ownership over decisions typically handled by product and design teams.
• Natural collaboration supported by deliberate communication, limiting meetings to protect focused work time.
• Investments in tooling and abstractions to increase leverage without simply growing team size.
• Diverse, talented, humble, and kind team members fostering a supportive and collaborative environment.
• Ownership-driven projects where engineers research problems, write specs, build prototypes, and deliver end-to-end solutions.
• Focus time is protected with fewer than 2 hours of meetings per week per engineer, alongside in-person gatherings twice yearly and budgeted local meetups.
• Rapid deployment cycles (15+ times daily) supported by robust CI/CD pipelines (~10-minute build times) and developer tooling enhancements contributed by everyone.

Who Should Apply

• Individuals passionate about continuing to code while growing as managers.
• Candidates excited by the challenge of inspiring others and improving engineering team dynamics.
• Those who embrace ownership, autonomy, and are willing to challenge status quo processes in engineering management.

Who Should Not Apply

• Those who do not enjoy coding or prioritizing technical skill maintenance.
• Individuals pursuing management solely for career progression without genuine interest in leadership.
• Managers wanting to control all product decisions themselves rather than empowering their teams.
• People comfortable with teams that require excessive guardrails or prefer traditional rigid processes.
• Those who believe large teams require strict process implementations and cannot envision a different model.