Engineering Manager (Backend)

Allianz Partners; Croydon; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Allianz Partners is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager (Backend) to lead the people, delivery, and operational excellence of the backend engineering organisation within the Advanced Analytics (DA3) function.

You’ll oversee teams building Java/Spring Boot and Python/FastAPI services, drive hiring and workforce planning, and ensure high standards, reliability, and productive engineering culture across the organisation.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with leadership responsibilities.
• Experience leading backend or full-stack engineering teams.
• Proven track record in hiring, onboarding, and talent development.
• Strong stakeholder management and cross-team collaboration.
• Experience delivering in a regulated enterprise environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow backend engineering teams across Java/Spring Boot and Python/FastAPI.
• Drive hiring, onboarding, performance management, and succession planning.
• Partner with senior stakeholders to align team structures with business priorities.
• Improve engineering standards, developer tooling, and delivery processes.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to plan and execute delivery.

Skills

Engineering leadership

People management

Hiring experience

Stakeholder management

Delivery excellence

Tools

Java/Spring Boot

Python/FastAPI

Kubernetes

Kafka

GitHub Actions

ArgoCD

Job description

We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager (Backend) to lead the people, delivery, and operational excellence behind our backend engineering organisation within the Advanced Analytics (DA3) function.

In this role, you’ll oversee teams building the foundational backend capabilities that power data, analytics, AI, and digital products across the organisation. You’ll lead a diverse backend engineering population spanning both Java/Spring Boot and Python/FastAPI ecosystems, helping scale high-performing teams while enabling consistent engineering standards, developer productivity, and reliable service delivery.

This is a leadership role focused on people management, team growth, hiring, workforce planning, and delivery excellence. You will work closely with senior technical leaders who own architecture and engineering standards, ensuring teams have the structure, capacity, and support required to deliver at scale.

What You’ll Do

Lead and Grow High-Performing Engineering Teams

• Manage, mentor, and develop backend engineering teams across multiple disciplines and technology stacks.
• Drive hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, succession planning, and employee engagement.
• Support Engineering Leads and senior engineers in their growth as technical and team leaders.
• Foster a strong engineering culture focused on collaboration, continuous improvement, accountability, and inclusion.

Build Organisational Capacity

• Own workforce planning and capacity management across Java and Python engineering teams.
• Partner with senior stakeholders to align team structures, skill mix, and hiring plans with business priorities.
• Ensure teams are appropriately staffed to meet evolving product and platform demands.

Enable Engineering Excellence

• Partner with technical leaders responsible for backend frameworks, microservice foundations, API standards, testing practices, and developer tooling.
• Support the adoption and consistent implementation of engineering standards across backend teams.
• Help drive continuous improvement initiatives that enhance quality, scalability, and developer productivity.

Drive Delivery and Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with engineering, product, AI, platform, and frontend leadership to ensure aligned delivery plans and priorities.
• Facilitate cross-team planning, dependency management, and continuous improvement activities.
• Contribute delivery, quality, and organisational metrics to senior leadership discussions.
• Support change management and release planning processes within a regulated enterprise environment.

Talent Acquisition and Team Development

• Lead structured recruitment processes for backend engineering and engineering leadership positions.
• Establish consistent interview and assessment practices that maintain a high hiring bar.
• Build strong onboarding, coaching, and career development programmes to support employee growth and retention.

What You’ll Bring

Experience

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years in an engineering leadership or people management role.
• Proven experience leading backend or full-stack engineering teams in modern software delivery environments.
• Track record managing multiple teams and supporting engineers at different career stages.
• Experience with performance management, career frameworks, talent development, and organisational planning.
• Strong background in hiring, interviewing, and scaling engineering teams.

Technical Understanding

You Do Not Need To Be The Technical Decision Maker, But You Should Have Strong Technical Credibility Across Modern Backend Engineering Practices, Including

• Java and Spring Boot applications at enterprise scale.
• Python and FastAPI-based services.
• Microservice architectures and distributed systems.
• API design, versioning, and integration patterns.
• Event-driven architectures using Kafka or similar technologies.
• Kubernetes-based deployments and cloud-native delivery models.
• CI/CD practices, GitHub Actions, GitOps, and ArgoCD.

Leadership Skills

• Coaching-first leadership style with a focus on empowering technical experts.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Ability to influence across multiple teams and organisational boundaries.
• Strong problem-solving and prioritisation capabilities.
• Experience operating in complex, matrixed, or chapter-based organisations.

What We Offer

Our employees play an integral part in our success as a business. We appreciate that each of our employees are unique and have unique needs, ambitions and we enjoy being a part of their journey. We are there to empower and encourage you with your personal and professional development ensuring that you take control by offering a large variety of courses and targeted development programs. All that in a global environment where international mobility and career progression are encouraged. Caring for your health and wellbeing is key priority for us. This is why we build Work Well programs to providing you with peace of mind and give the flexibility in planning and arranging for a better work-life balance.

At Allianz we use some AI-assisted technology as part of our recruitment process to help match candidates to roles based on skills, experience, job title, and location. AI supports our recruiters by enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of candidate assessments and job recommendations, while all applications are reviewed by our recruitment team and final hiring decisions are made by humans.

103171 | Data & AI | Professional | Allianz Executive | Allianz Partners | Full-Time | Permanent

Allianz Group is one of the most trusted insurance and asset management companies in the world. Caring for our employees, their ambitions, dreams and challenges is what makes us a unique employer. We are united by a shared commitment: to put our customers first and at the center of everything we do. Their needs inspire our thinking and guide our actions. Together, we can build an environment where everyone feels empowered and confident to explore, grow and shape a better future – for our customers and for the world around us.

At Allianz, we stand for unity: we believe that a united world is a more prosperous world, and we are dedicated to consistently advocating for equal opportunities for all. The foundation for this is our inclusive workplace, where people and performance both matter, and where integrity, fairness, inclusion and trust are at the heart of our culture. We therefore welcome applications regardless of race, ethnicity or cultural background, age, gender, nationality, religion, social class, disability or sexual orientation, or any other characteristics protected under applicable local laws and regulations.

Join us. Let’s care for tomorrow.

Note: Having different strengths, experiences, perspectives and approaches is an integral part of Allianz's company culture. One means to achieve this is a regular rotation of Allianz employees across functions, Allianz entities and geographies. Therefore, Allianz expects from its employees a general openness and a high motivation to regularly change positions and collect experiences across Allianz Group.