Engineering Manager - Trust Detection

DEPOP; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health & wellbeing

Cycle to Work

EAP support

Sabbatical after 5 years

Hybrid working

Life insurance

Pension matching

In-office Depop Shop

Job summary

Depop is seeking a UK-based Engineering Manager to lead our Trust Detection team. You will manage backend engineers, shape the roadmap with ML and PM, and deliver production-ready models that keep the platform safe. You’ll mentor engineers and foster a collaborative, high‑trust culture.

You’ll partner with ML and Product leaders, drive delivery, and ensure technical direction across the trust platform. This is a hybrid role in the UK with room to grow and impact.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading and developing engineering teams.
• Strong software engineering background with architecture decisions.
• Experience delivering production-grade systems and reliability.
• Interest in ML or data-heavy teams is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the Trust Detection team and its leadership trio.
• Partner with ML Manager and Product Manager on direction and roadmap.
• Own delivery, health of the team, and production quality of platform.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to align goals and outcomes.

Skills

Engineering mgmt

Software architecture

Production systems

ML exposure

People leadership

Tools

MLOps

Backend systems

Job description

Company Description

Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new. Founded in 2011, Depop's diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it. From everyday essentials to vintage and designer finds, Depop brings together a wide range of affordable styles in one place. It's a marketplace where anyone can clear out their wardrobe or build a business, explore their style, and take part in a more circular way to shop. As part of eBay, we're continuing to invest in our platform, our people and our mission to build a more circular future for fashion. Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. For more information, visit our News Room here.

Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users. We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We're continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have. If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to [e-mail].

AI Disclosure

We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.

The Role

Depop is looking for a UK-based Engineering Manager to lead our Trust Detection team.

Trust Detection's team goal is to catch the bad content and behaviour before the Depop community gets hurt by it. That means fake listings, phishing messages, counterfeits, and the people behind them.

We're a team of ML Scientists and Backend Engineers. We build, train and maintain our own models, and bring in third‑party tools where they're the better fit. We also build the platform that runs it all in production and acts on what it detects. We prioritise automation as much as we can, so moderators can focus on the hard calls. Every decision a model or a human makes becomes training data for the next one.

Our signals are used across Depop, in listings, search, chat and account security. We want to catch bad actors at the account level rather than one listing at a time, step in in real time, and offer our risk scores as a service other teams can build on.

You’ll manage the backend engineers on the team and form its leadership trio alongside the ML Manager and Product Manager. Together, you’ll set direction, shape the roadmap and turn the team’s mission into shipped, measurable impact.

What you’ll do

Lead and grow the team

• Manage, coach and develop a team of Backend Engineers through 1:1s, feedback, career growth and performance.
• Build an inclusive, high-trust culture where ML and Backend Engineers work as one team, not two disciplines handing work over a wall.
• Shape the team’s hiring, onboarding and ways of working as it grows.

Be one third of the leadership trio

• Partner with the ML Manager and Product Manager to set the team’s direction, priorities and roadmap.
• Own team delivery and health while the ML Manager leads on modelling approach and the PM on problem and outcome. Hold each other to a shared set of goals.
• Own the technical direction of the trust detection platform, working with staff engineers and partner teams to deliver it.
• Turn strategy into a clear plan: break down ambiguous problems, sequence the work, and keep momentum high.

Drive delivery and engineering quality

• Help the team take models from experiment to reliable production systems, including real-time inference, monitoring and safe rollouts.
• Stay close to architecture and technical trade‑offs, especially as we build shared risk‑scoring services used by other teams.
• Lift engineering standards across both disciplines: testing, observability, cost, and operational excellence for systems that act on users.
• Make risks, dependencies and decisions visible early, so the right support and alignment are in place.

Work across the business

• Collaborate and influence Trust & Safety Operations, Policy, Legal, Data and partner product teams who consume the team’s signals.
• Help the team balance user safety, fairness to genuine sellers, compliance obligations and speed, and explain those trade‑offs clearly.
• Champion how we measure success: harm prevented, model precision and recall, and how often decisions are overturned.

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for an engineering leader who combines technical depth, product judgement, and inclusive people leadership.

You’ll be a strong fit if you bring:

• Experience managing and developing engineers, ideally including senior engineers.
• A strong software engineering background, with the confidence to engage in architecture and technical trade‑offs.
• Experience leading teams that run production systems, with a focus on reliability and quality.
• Experience working with, or a real appetite to learn how to lead, ML or data‑heavy teams. You don’t need to build models, but you should be curious about how they get from notebook to production.
• Clear ownership of team health and delivery, and the ability to create momentum in ambiguous, fast‑changing problem spaces.
• A collaborative style in a shared‑leadership model: you’re comfortable with healthy disagreement and making decisions together.
• The confidence to challenge engineers, ML, product partners and stakeholders constructively.
• Motivation to protect people and help build trusted online communities.

Helpful experience, not dealbreakers

We don’t expect one person to bring all of this. Adjacent experience and curiosity are just as valuable.

• ML in production: MLOps, model serving, real‑time inference, feature pipelines, retraining or monitoring for drift.
• Detection and risk: trust and safety, fraud, abuse, spam, content moderation or marketplace integrity.
• Platform thinking: building shared services or APIs that other teams depend on.
• Measurement: experimentation, shadow testing, golden‑set evaluation or other ways of proving a model’s real‑world impact.
• Cross‑functional delivery: working with Operations, Policy, Legal, Compliance or Security partners.

What’s in it for you

You’ll lead a young, high‑impact team at an exciting point. Trust Detection is a growing team with a lot still to build, so there’s plenty of room to make a big impact and grow with it. You’ll shape how we scale: catching bad actors at the account level, acting in real time, and building a risk platform the rest of Depop relies on. You’ll work where ML, engineering and real user impact meet, with strong support from your trio partners, the wider Trust & Support group and engineering leadership.

Additional information

Health + Mental Wellbeing PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting Work/Life Balance: 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love. Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid‑working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options *role-dependent All offices are dog-friendly Family Life: For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave Learn + Grow: Twice‑yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews Learning budget Upskilling our employees with company‑wide training workshops, materials and resources Your Future: Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary) Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva Depop Extras: In‑office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery. Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!