Engineering Manager

Company Confidential; Kuwait City; On-site; KWD 40,000 - 65,000; Full time

Job summary

Company Confidential in Kuwait City is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead backend teams responsible for large-scale e-commerce services. You will steer technical direction across Java-based distributed systems and microservices, and participate in architecture discussions with architects and tech leads.

The role emphasizes scalability, performance, security and reliability, with ownership of on-call, incident reviews and continuous delivery improvements.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 3+ years in Engineering Manager, Technical Manager, Engineering Lead or equivalent leadership positions.
• Experience with large-scale, high-traffic transactional platforms (E-commerce/Merchant platforms preferred).
• Strong Java and Spring Boot expertise.
• Ability to design scalable architectures and lead cross-functional teams.
• Proven incident investigation and root-cause analysis capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead backend engineering teams building large-scale e-commerce services.
• Provide technical direction across Java-based distributed systems and microservices.
• Take part in architecture discussions with architects and technical leads.
• Review and challenge designs for scalability, performance, security, maintainability and cost.
• Guide teams on service boundaries, APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven systems, caching strategies and data models.
• Identify architectural risks, debt and bottlenecks early before production.
• Balance pragmatic delivery with long-term platform quality.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Distributed systems

Microservices

API design

Kafka

Redis

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

SQL & NoSQL

AWS / cloud

Docker / Kubernetes

CI/CD

Observability & APM

AI-assisted development

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Software/Engineering

Master's degree (advantage)

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Elasticsearch

Redis

SQL/NoSQL databases

APM tools

Job description

Key Responsibilities

Engineering & Technical Leadership

• Lead and develop high-performing backend engineering teams building large-scale e-commerce services.


• Provide strong technical direction across Java-based distributed systems and microservices.


• Take an active part in architecture and system-design discussions, alongside architects and technical leads.


• Review and challenge designs for scalability, performance, resilience, security, maintainability and cost.


• Guide teams in designing clear service boundaries, APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven systems, caching strategies and data models.


• Identify architectural risks, technical debt, performance bottlenecks and scalability limits early, before they reach production.


• Balance pragmatic delivery with long-term platform quality, avoiding both over-engineering and short-term shortcuts.

E-commerce Domain Ownership

Lead engineering across high-volume customer-facing domains such as:

• Product Catalog


• Product Search & Discovery


• Pricing and Promotions


• Shopping Cart


• Checkout


• Payments


• Customer and Session Services


• Inventory availability integrations


• Order initiation and downstream integrations

You should understand the technical challenges behind large catalogs, high read/write volumes, concurrent shopping sessions, campaign traffic, flash-sale behavior, checkout consistency, pricing accuracy, inventory validation, payment reliability and customer experience.

Scalability, Performance & Reliability

• Establish measurable performance and reliability objectives (SLOs) for critical services.


• Improve API latency, throughput, database performance, caching efficiency and system capacity.


• Drive proper use of load testing, stress testing, profiling, capacity planning and performance benchmarking.


• Build systems resilient to partial failures through timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, idempotency, graceful degradation, dead-letter handling, and event replay and reconciliation.


• Make sure teams own their services in production, including on-call and peak campaign periods.


• Lead or actively take part in major production incident investigation, root‑cause analysis and permanent corrective actions.

Engineering Excellence

• Raise engineering standards across design, coding, testing, deployment, documentation, security and observability.


• Build a strong code‑review culture where every review improves engineering quality.


• Improve automated testing across unit, integration, contract, performance and critical end‑to‑end flows.


• Strengthen CI/CD and release practices to enable frequent and safe deployments.


• Establish clear engineering metrics: deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, mean time to recovery, production defects, service reliability, performance and technical debt.


• Fix recurring issues at the root so the team spends its time building, not firefighting.

AI-First Engineering Leadership

We already run AI agents for code review and production monitoring, and we expect our Engineering Managers to be strong practitioners of AI‑assisted software engineering. You will:

• Use AI coding assistants extensively as part of daily engineering work.


• Be comfortable with agentic development workflows for prototyping, investigation, refactoring, testing, documentation and implementation.


• Understand how coding agents, LLMs, MCP‑based tools, repository‑aware agents and AI‑assisted IDEs improve engineering productivity.


• Use AI to accelerate codebase discovery, debugging, test generation, code review, documentation and technical analysis.


• Understand the limitations of AI‑generated code and keep security, architecture, quality and human review intact.


• Coach engineers on effective and responsible AI‑assisted development.


• Continuously evaluate emerging AI engineering tools and introduce useful practices into the development lifecycle.


• Measure AI adoption by actual improvements in engineering productivity and quality, not by tool usage alone.

People Leadership

• Lead, coach and develop engineers and technical leads.


• Set clear expectations around ownership, technical quality, delivery and collaboration.


• Grow strong technical leaders within the team so that decisions do not depend on one person.


• Conduct meaningful performance discussions and create individual development plans.


• Identify performance gaps early and address them constructively.


• Participate actively in hiring and maintain a high technical hiring bar.


• Build succession plans for critical technical and leadership positions.


• Create a culture where engineers challenge ideas constructively, take ownership, learn continuously and understand the business impact of their systems.

Delivery & Product Partnership

• Partner closely with Product, QA, Architecture, DevOps/SRE, Data, Security and other engineering teams.


• Translate business requirements into technically sound and realistically executable engineering plans.


• Challenge requirements when they introduce unnecessary complexity, technical risk or poor customer experience.


• Improve estimation, planning, dependency management and release predictability.


• Balance new product development with reliability, performance improvements, technical debt and platform modernization.


• Communicate technical risks and trade‑offs clearly to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.


• Own customer and business outcomes, well beyond tracking tickets or reporting delivery status.

Required Experience

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant hands‑on backend engineering experience.


• 3+ years in Engineering Manager, Technical Manager, Engineering Lead or equivalent leadership positions.


• Experience with large-scale, high-traffic transactional platforms. E‑commerce, marketplace or retail technology experience is strongly preferred.


• Demonstrated experience with high traffic and concurrency, large product or transactional datasets, high‑volume APIs, distributed services and mission‑critical customer journeys.


• Strong experience with Java and Spring Boot.


• Strong understanding of microservices architecture, distributed systems, REST APIs, event‑driven architecture, messaging and asynchronous processing, caching, database design and optimization, search technologies and cloud‑native systems.


• Experience with technologies such as Kafka or similar messaging platforms, Redis, OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, SQL and NoSQL databases, AWS or a comparable public cloud, Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD platforms and modern observability and APM tools.

Specific technology combinations are less important than demonstrated ability to design and operate large‑scale production systems.

E-commerce Experience

Candidates should be able to discuss real production examples involving areas such as:

• Scaling catalog services containing large numbers of products and attributes


• Search performance and relevance


• Cache design and invalidation


• High‑volume campaign or peak‑period traffic


• Cart persistence and consistency


• Pricing and promotion accuracy


• Checkout concurrency


• Payment failures and reconciliation


• Distributed transaction challenges


• Inventory availability


• API latency and P95/P99 performance


• Production incidents and root‑cause analysis


• Database and search‑cluster scaling

We are particularly interested in candidates who can explain these problems with real numbers, architectural decisions, trade‑offs, failures and lessons learned.

Leadership Profile

The ideal candidate:

• Is technically credible with senior engineers and can go deep without micromanaging implementation.


• Makes decisions using data and challenges architecture constructively.


• Understands both customer experience and backend engineering consequences, and can simplify complex systems.


• Creates strong engineers and future technical leaders, and sets a high bar for engineering quality.


• Communicates clearly with Product and Business stakeholders.


• Learns new technologies quickly and actively experiments with modern engineering and AI practices.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.


• Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Technology Management or a related field is an advantage.

What Success Looks Like

Within the first year, the Engineering Manager should be able to show:

• Peak campaigns delivered on owned services without a critical incident.


• Change failure rate and mean time to recovery improved against the starting baseline.


• An SLO, a dashboard and a named owner for every critical service.


• Stronger automated testing on critical flows, with more frequent and more confident releases.


• Better delivery predictability and a visible, shrinking technical debt backlog.


• A credible successor identified for each technical lead role.


• Measurable productivity and quality gains from AI‑assisted engineering.

Most importantly, the Engineering Manager should leave the engineering organization technically stronger than they found it, with better systems, stronger engineers, stronger technical leaders and higher engineering standards.