Engineering Manager - Search & Sort

Awaze; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual Bonus Scheme

25 days holidays

Holiday Discounts across AWAZE brands

Personal training allowance

Hybrid working (Manchester office 2d/w

Job summary

Awaze is transforming its tech stack to power a scalable, AI-driven search and discovery experience across Europe’s largest vacation rentals network. You will lead the Search team, shaping architecture and product direction while mentoring engineers and driving best practices across backend and frontend systems.

The role focuses on building fast, reliable search services, with OpenSearch-backed APIs, a Places API in TypeScript, and a Next.js customer-facing search app.

Qualifications

• Experience leading a product-driven engineering team.
• Proven ability to scale high-volume distributed systems.
• Experience with OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, cloud services (AWS).
• Strong backend and API expertise, with Kotlin/TypeScript.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for the end-to-end Search platform.
• Lead a cross-functional full-stack team.
• Champion best practices: CI/CD, TDD, cloud-native.
• Mentor grads, juniors and mid-level engineers.
• Collaborate with international tech teams.
• Ensure reliability and DevOps ownership.
• Contribute to Awaze tech community.

Skills

Engineering Manager

Tech Lead

Full stack

Backend

Frontend

OpenSearch

AWS

Terraform

Kotlin

TypeScript

Next.js

React

Data analytics

Stakeholder mgmt

Mentoring

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Job description

The way people discover and book holidays is changing, and we're rebuilding our technology for what comes next.

We are Awaze, Europe’s largest managed vacation rentals and holiday resorts business, bringing together some of the continent’s most recognised travel brands, including cottages.com, Hoseasons, NOVASOL and James Villa Holidays.

With more than 1.5 million bookings every year, 100,000+ properties and customers across Europe, we already operate at serious scale. But the next chapter for Awaze is about much more than scale.

We’re embarking on an ambitious AI transformation that will reshape how our customers discover, plan and book their holidays, and how our engineering teams build the technology behind those experiences.

Our strategy spans AI-powered search, natural-language discovery, intelligent recommendations, richer property data and AI-assisted engineering, all underpinned by a platform built around speed, trust, quality and real-time data.

Team: Search

The Role & Responsibilities

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Search Team and help shape how millions of guests discover their next perfect getaway. As a leading holiday rentals company, search isn't just a utility on our platforms, it's the heartbeat of our booking journey.

Our Search Product Team is responsible for orchestrating the search experience across our diverse portfolio of brands, connecting guests with more than 100,000 properties, including cottages, luxury lodges and holiday parks. The team owns the full vertical, from the backend Search API built using Kotlin and OpenSearch, through to the Places API built using TypeScript and the customer-facing Search application built using Next.js and TypeScript

We build and optimise everything from lightning-fast location queries and feature filtering to high-performance price sorting, availability matching and cutting-edge, machine-learning-driven recommendation algorithms. We also build the customer experience that allows guests to discover and explore our properties.

You'll be responsible for leading the team across the entire product lifecycle and across the full Search technology stack. This includes building robust backend services and APIs while delivering a slick, intuitive and high-performing customer experience. If you enjoy solving complex data retrieval, filtering and multi-brand indexing challenges at scale, while directly impacting the customer journey, we'd love to have you on board.

You’ll drive engineering best practices, shape innovative products, and create seamless booking experiences for our guests and owners. Expect to experiment, collaborate, and mentor the next generation of engineers.

Key Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership and act as the technical authority for the end-to-end Search platform
• Lead a cross-functional, full stack team building innovative search and discovery solutions
• Champion engineering best practices such as pair and mob programming, AI-assisted and agentic coding, CI/CD, TDD, and cloud-native architectures.
• Support a learning culture through mentoring grads, juniors, and mid-level engineers
• Collaborate with engineers across our international tech teams
• Operate what you build, reliability and DevOps is everyone’s job
• Actively contribute to the wider Awaze tech community

What we’re looking for:

We're looking for an experienced Engineering Manager who’s passionate about inspiring those around them. You should be someone who thrives on solving complex problems and knows that the right solution should drive the tech, not the other way around.

We don’t expect you to tick every box, but experience in a mixture of the following is great:

• You are currently working as an Engineering Manager | Tech Lead in a Product/Customer-driven environment, leading a small team of full stack engineers
• Experience managing engineers across both backend and frontend technologies is preferable. If your experience leans more heavily towards one area, a strong backend background would be advantageous
• Extensive background in high-volume, scalable distributed systems
• Experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch or similar search technologies would be usefulli>
• Experience with cloud services (ideally AWS), Infra-as-Code tools like Terraform or CloudFormation and best practices for scalable infrastructure
• Strong background in backend and API technologies, ideally including Kotlin and TypeScript, with experience or working knowledge of frontend technologies such as Next.js and React
• Understanding of experimentation and analytics tools such as Optimizely and Google Analytics is highly advantageous
• Ability to use data and metrics to inform decisions, effect change, and align engineering efforts with business goals
• Extensive stakeholder management experience with a focus on working with the wider business and the ability to create alignment across teams
• Experience in coaching, mentoring, and growing your team, empowering each of them to fulfil their potential.

What will we offer you?

• Annual Bonus Scheme
• 25 days holidays (plus the option to buy an unlimited number of additional days)
• Holiday Discounts (across all AWAZE brands)
• Personal training allowance via Sunlight
• Hybrid working (we work 2 days in our Manchester office every week, with 3 days working from home)