Engineering Manager (Data Processing Engines)

Workato; München; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible Working Arrangements

Great Employee Benefits

Professional Development Opportunities

Dedicated Wellness & Recreation Time

Job summary

Workato is seeking a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a team building core internal infrastructure and developer-facing systems. You will work at the intersection of project management, engineering leadership, and platform development, guiding senior engineers across Rust, Go, Ruby, Java, Python, and WASM.

You will collaborate with Product Managers and department VP to define product direction, manage roadmaps, and deliver multi-quarter initiatives while maintaining team autonomy and high

Qualifications

• Experience leading senior, autonomous engineers
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and practices
• Experience owning roadmaps and delivering multi-quarter initiatives
• Experience hiring, coaching, and developing engineers
• Ability to understand complex technical discussions without owning every implementation
• Experience with platform engineering, developer infrastructure or backend infra
• Clear cross-functional communication with Product and Engineering leadership
• Open to using AI-assisted development and automation to improve workflows

Responsibilities

• Define and own team roadmaps and execution across multiple workstreams
• Lead and develop engineers with significant ownership of their domains
• Balance new development, customer commitments, and technical debt
• Plan releases, capacity, and hiring as needed
• Collaborate with Product Managers to align priorities and timelines
• Review designs and architecture discussions, challenge assumptions when needed
• Drive engineering metrics to improve delivery and quality
• Maintain team health and performance through regular feedback and 1:1s

Skills

Engineering management

Platform engineering

Roadmaps

People leadership

Stakeholder management

Autonomy

Golang

Rust

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

CI/CD

Developer tooling

Backend infrastructure

Distributed systems

Tools

Rust

Go

Ruby

Java

Python

WASM

PostgreSQL

Job description

• We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a team building core internal infrastructure and developer-facing systems
• This role sits at the intersection of project management, engineering leadership, and platform development
• The team (Evaluation Engines / Data processing engines) owns foundational components which are embedded into higher level workflow engines and tools
• Examples are formula evaluation, data transformation according to predefined mapping, decision models, etc
• The team is technically strong and highly autonomous
• We are looking for an Engineering Manager who can operate effectively in this environment: someone with a strong engineering background who understands complex systems, but does not need to be the deepest technical expert in every area
• Your role will be to help experienced engineers work effectively together, create clarity across interconnected initiatives, and improve how the team plans, collaborates, and delivers
• You will manage and develop experienced engineers with significant ownership of their technical domains. The team is mostly Rust engineers, however they also build libraries for several other programming languages: Go, Ruby, Java, Python, and WASM
• You will be responsible for regular 1:1s, feedback, performance management, career development, hiring, onboarding, and team health
• We expect you to create an environment where engineers can remain highly autonomous while having clear priorities, ownership, and accountability. You will be responsible for team capacity planning and hiring when needed
• You will be working closely with Product Managers and department VP to define how the products look, what to build and in which order, what new exciting features we can bring to our customers. As this area is highly technical and speaks Computer Science terms at times, Product Managers will greatly rely on your and your team expertise to make decisions
• You will be responsible for working with Quality Engineering and Product Security teams to deliver high-quality products. At the same time in this AI era we expect you to embrace new tools to shift quality and security scans left
• Own planning and operational execution across multiple engineering workstreams
• Create visibility into priorities, dependencies, timelines, and resource allocation
• Help the team turn broad technical direction into an executable roadmap
• Identify and remove blockers before they significantly impact delivery
• Balance new development, customer commitments, operational work, and technical debt
• Define meaningful engineering metrics and use them to identify opportunities for improvement
• Keep stakeholders informed about progress, risks, and trade-offs
• Plan release and update cycles of the product
• Maintain the product, be responsible for defects triaging and mitigation
• This is strictly not a purely people-management role
• Technical background and experience is a must
• We don’t expect you to be a fluent Rust developer, we in fact are not expecting you to know Rust at all
• But you should be comfortable participating in technical discussions, reviewing designs and architecture proposals, understanding engineering trade-offs, and challenging assumptions when needed
• You should have a wide industry knowledge, and understand the pros and cons of different programming languages and platforms
• Depending on your background and interests, you may also review code, contribute to tooling or prototypes, participate in incident investigation, or use automation and AI-assisted development to improve engineering workflows
• At the same time, we do not expect the Engineering Manager to make every technical decision
• Senior engineers (your team will contain a mix of engineers up to Staff and Architect levels) own significant parts of the technical direction, and a key part of the role is enabling them to do that effectively

Benefits

• Flexible Working Arrangements: We want to empower our employees to give us their 110%, and still be able to fully live their personal lives beyond what they do at Workato.
• Great Employee Benefits: Our employee benefits are designed not just to help everyone at Workato fulfill their basic and tangible needs, but also feel appreciated for their contributions to the company.
• Professional Development Opportunities: We are invested in the long-term professional development of our people, beyond what they bring to the table on their first day at work.

We support individual career ambitions, and set aside training programs and budgets they can tap on to upgrade both soft and hard skills.

• Dedicated Wellness & Recreation Time: We make it a point to dedicate time to pause, recharge and get to know each other better.

From virtual game nights to fitness sessions, there’s always time for a little fun on the calendars.

Experience with CI/CD, release engineering, developer tooling, or internal engineering platformsA pragmatic approach to engineering processes: enough structure to make teams effective, without unnecessary bureaucracyExperience managing senior, autonomous engineersAbility to understand complex technical discussions without needing to personally own every implementation decisionSignificant software engineering experience before or alongside engineering managementStrong understanding of software development lifecycle and engineering practicesExperience hiring, coaching, and developing engineersExperience owning roadmaps and delivering multi-quarter engineering initiativesStrong stakeholder management and cross-functional communication skillsA strong background in platform engineering, developer infrastructure, developer productivity, backend infrastructure, or distributed systemsExperience managing technical debt alongside product and business prioritiesMost importantly, you combine technical credibility with strong people and execution leadershipYou enjoy finding problems in the engineering system itself: unclear ownership, slow reviews, hidden dependencies, fragmented tooling, competing priorities, or processes that depend too heavily on individuals pushing things forwardYou are comfortable aligning your team roadmap with requirements from Product Managers, and from Engineering leadership, which may be different, and working with different stakeholders in generalInstead of trying to become the technical owner of every component, you ask the right questions, understand trade-offs, create clarity, and help engineers make good decisions togetherYou can move between a conversation about architecture or CI pipelines, a 1:1 with an engineer, roadmap prioritization with Product, and a discussion about why delivery is taking longer than expectedYou are comfortable joining a team where engineers may understand individual systems more deeply than you doGolang or Rust; understanding of WASM platformBasic understanding of formal grammar, AST, compiler frontendsOpen-source developmentObservability and operational toolingAI-assisted software development and automated code reviewPostgreSQL or database infrastructureKubernetes, Docker, Terraform, or cloud infrastructureMulti-repository development environmentsDeveloper-facing APIs, SDKs, libraries, or integrations