Engineering Manager (Staff Level)

About The Opportunity

We have a rare opportunity to join us a Staff-level Engineering Manager within our Engineering, Product and Design ("EPD") team.  Our EPD team has played a big part in our journey to becoming a world leading fintech business.  We operate with a squad system and Agile ways of working within quarterly terms.  We hold regular ‘Hack Weeks’ to look at products and address problems relating to the business - and to work on things we’re interested in and feel passionately about. 

As an Engineering Manager you’ll be responsible for the development of our Backend Engineers as well as the overall performance and technical direction of one or more global squads. You'll coach and develop our future technical leaders – helping our EPD community to make high-quality decisions.  You’ll be a techie and an engineer at heart and someone who’s still confident and capable in delivering code.  You’ll have likely moved into management because you love helping and coaching others, as well as being a technical expert in your field.

We believe that our people are what makes our company what it is.  If you’re successful in joining us, you’ll see we’re a community of engineers that promise both a warm, collaborative working style - and a place where you’ll be stretched to learn new things and grow your career.  To help you prepare for the interview process, we’d also recommend you view this guide.  We want to empower you to pick your own journey through the interview process, so you can decide how and in what order you would like to work through the stages. 

Your Focus

Technical Capability

• Provide direction and hands-on technical guidance to the squads you manage, making sure core squad processes are understood, documented, and followed.
• Ensures the technical output of the team is high quality and sustainable. Your squads should be delivering and contributing to our global platform architecture – and technical choices need to be fit for purpose and well evaluated.
• Drive and deliver continuous improvement of our processes and our wider processes deliver quality outcomes.
• Partner with our Backend Engineers to drive technical initiatives that improve our engineering practices.
• Work collaboratively with our Product Managers and senior technical leaders to establish priorities, trade-offs, and a path forward.

Leadership and Relationships

• Guide and lead your squads to deliver against both technical and personal development targets - which meet our regulatory standards.
• Lead by example and role modelling our company values - inspiring others to do the same.
• Provide leadership support that encourages both personal commitment and high-performing team culture.
• Set individual objectives for both your team and direct reports - carrying out regular performance reviews to manage and implement personal development plans.
• Coach your direct reports’ personal and professional development, proactively managing any areas of underperformance and developing improvement plans as needed.
• Partner with People to implement resource plans and hiring forecasts, with an emphasis on maintaining candidate experience and a direct sourcing strategy.
• Partner with the wider Engineering leadership team to onboard and embed talent within your squads.

What Leads to Success

Here are some of the individual skills we know will enable you to succeed in this position. If you don’t tick every box - don't worry.  We can support you in both your personal and professional development:

• Your colleagues say you're the sort of person who likes to move fast, pragmatically seeking problems and thinking about the wider impact to the business.
• You support others to deliver the best work possible, being there to guide, support and help unblock any problems.
• You value diversity and are sensitive to different lived experiences, environments, and cultures.
• You take a structured approach to complex problems, use data to inform decisions and communicate clearly.
• You know how to communicate and build resilient relationships with others across the business - you build rapport easily by being approachable and responsive.
• You immerse yourself in new challenges, learning from others and helping others learn new skills along the way.
• One of your biggest strengths is being able to work across multiple projects at the same time - and changing course quickly if necessary.

What We’re Looking For

• You’ve previously worked as a Backend Engineer at a senior level and you’re able to lead technical problem solving and write code in Python.
• You’re able to contribute effectively to technical debates with your squads and across the wider Engineering leadership team.
• You've made the transition into a leadership role and you’ve had a couple of years’ experience of managing others in a remote-first environment. You know what “good” looks like for a high-performing team of engineers and know how to get there.
• You’re able to work within an Agile environment and ideally, you’ve got some experience of working for a regulated industry like ours.

Our Tech Stack

We are on a mission to become the best we can be, constantly challenging ourselves to achieve and learn.  You will be supported to learn new technology – both in breadth and depth - and encouraged to challenge our ways of thinking with new and innovative ideas.

Our “north star” is to become an elite performer as defined by the 4 key DORA metrics.  To drive towards elite status, we apply and continually inspect and adapt the best Agile frameworks and practices inspired by DevOps, SRE, Scrum, XP and Lean.  We are a highly collaborative environment and regularly practice Mob and Pair based programming which we believe improve our quality of delivery and share understanding.

We take our operational performance, security, and reliability as seriously as our quality and development practices.  We are entirely cloud hosted on AWS and highly automated.

Some specific technologies we use include: Python | AWS Lambda | MongoDB | Vue.JS | Prismic | CDK