Engineering Manager - UK

Welcome to the Jungle; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Winter break 25 Dec – 1 Jan

4 day weeks after first month

Health insurance (Vitality)

OfficeBreakfast & Snacks

Lunch every 2nd Wednesday

Job summary

Welcome to the Jungle is seeking an Engineering Manager to guide a software squad as the technical backbone. You will work closely with Product Managers and Designers to drive the roadmap, ensure architectural quality, and balance velocity with excellence.

Ideally, you have 7–12 years in engineering, including 2–5 years in team leadership, with a proven track record of shipping with Product and Design. FR- speaking is a plus but not required, as teams operate across Paris and London.

Qualifications

• 7–12 years in software engineering with product-led delivery.
• 2–5 years leading an engineering team in a product-first company.
• Strong capability to read code and challenge design without always shipping features.
• Track record of shipping with Product and Design and maintaining quality.

Responsibilities

• Lead a squad's technical leadership, ensuring velocity and quality targets.
• Collaborate with Product Managers and Designers on roadmap and tasks.
• Oversee architecture, design reviews, and code quality while not shipping code yourself.
• Drive AI adoption and productivity tools within the team.
• Coaching, development, and performance management of engineers.

Skills

Technical leadership

People leadership

Code reading

Shipping software

CI/CD

Observability

AI productivity tools

Tools

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

The Engineering Manager is responsible for leading a team of software engineers, acting as the technical leader and coach of their squad, while ensuring the successful delivery of technical projects and fostering a collaborative and high-performance culture.

This role involves close collaboration with Product Managers, Designers, and other stakeholders to drive the development roadmap, maintain technical excellence, and ensure that both quality and velocity goals are met.

With the current revolution triggered by AI tools, writing code and the profession of software engineers is changing rapidly. This makes the split between hands-on and hands-off engineering managers less accurate, but also makes the understanding of code even more important. Engineering Managers must understand, from a technical point of view, what their team is delivering. They can take part in code delivery, but this remains optional, even anecdotal, and they are not evaluated by their personal code delivery but on the delivery from their team. The Engineering Manager role drives effective resource allocation by focusing on hiring, prioritization, coaching, development, and feedback.

The Engineering Manager will report to the VP Engineering and will share the appropriate level of information and transparency to move projects forward.

Technical Leadership at Squad Level

• Collaborate with Product Manager & Designer on roadmap, project management, and daily tasks.
• Keep eyes-on oversight of the squad's technical decisions, architecture, and code quality, through code reviews, design reviews, and regular check-ins with the engineers without being the one shipping the code.
• Ensure team meets velocity and quality targets.
• Ensure smooth and clear communication between the team and the global leadership
• Analyze requirements, assess feasibility, and create documentation.
• Guarantee project goal achievement and address blockers.
• Uphold best practices (unit testing, TDD, etc.) with the QA team.
• Champion clean code principles, testing, and release practices.
• Oversee monitoring to ensure KPIs are met and fully functional.
• Manage support requests from internal teams, ensuring timely resolution of tickets.
• Drive AI adoption, and any tool that may improve productivity, within their team.

Team Management / Coaching & Development

• Lead a team of software engineers as the squad's technical backbone complementing your people leadership.
• Collaborate with People team to recruit, develop, and retain top talent.
• Be accountable for the team performance and foster growth for engineers.
• Ensure team cohesion, motivation, and smooth operations, including upskilling of junior members by more senior team members.
• Encourage ambition, high standards, and drive excellence.
• Align team performance with business objectives.

Technical Lead at Engineering Level

• Collaborate with other Tech leaders to coordinate priorities and projects.
• Work with VP Engineering to establish scalable processes as the team expands.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to elevate the overall engineering team.
• Develop, test, and improve cross-team processes, coordinating with the Tech leads to implement them.

• 24 days of annual leave + bank holidays
• In addition, we have a winter break where the office closes from 25 December to 1 January, so everyone can recharge
• 4 day weeks after your first month, with Fridays off
• Universal parental leave - 13 weeks' full pay, 13 weeks' half pay, 13 weeks' statutory pay (if you have been with us for at least 6 months), 13 weeks' unpaid (optional)
• Health insurance with Vitality, including dental and optician cover
• Breakfast, snacks and drinks at the office every day
• Lunch at the office every second Wednesday

7-12 years in engineering, including 2 to 5 years leading a team of engineers in a product-first companyReal technical credibility: you read code and challenge design, without needing to write the feature yourselfA track record of shipping with Product and Design, including when the plan changed mid-quarterStrong engineering standards across testing, CI/CD, observability, disciplined releasesA coaching instinct: clear expectations, honest feedback, genuine interest in seeing people growClear communication, upwards and sideways. You are able to have difficult conversations with clarity and confidence.Pragmatic about AI and developer productivity tools, and about measuring whether they actually pay offOur engineering teams work across Paris and London, therefore FR-speaking skills are highly desirable but not essential