Engineering Manager, Kafka

Vinted; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 100,000 - 121,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Share options program

25 working days holiday

Home office budget €540

Private health insurance

Team-building events

Office dog-friendly

Job summary

Vinted is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Kafka team to lead an infrastructure group delivering managed services and standards across product teams. You will focus on team health, growth, and sustainable delivery, while partnering with senior engineers and TPMs to shape roadmaps and cross-team alignment.

You will manage a 5-person team with plans to grow, ensuring high-quality services, clear priorities, and transparent communication across Vinted’s development org.

Qualifications

• Experience managing software and/or infrastructure engineering teams.
• Strong ability in goal-setting, performance reviews, and career growth planning.
• Comfortable working in a leadership triad with a Staff Engineer and TPM.
• Proven ability to establish structured workflows and manage stakeholders.
• Commitment to psychological safety and healthy on-call culture.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of 5+ infrastructure engineers, with performance reviews.
• Mentor engineers and support team growth.
• Monitor team health, velocity, and workload to maintain sustainable pace.
• Own operational procedures, agile workflows, incident response, and on-call practices.
• Unblock engineers, resolve cross-team dependencies, and collaborate with peer teams.
• Contribute to roadmaps with Staff Engineer and TPM; align delivery across teams.
• Communicate service expectations, SLAs, and roadmap visibility to stakeholders.

Skills

Team leadership

Coaching & development

Goal setting & feedback

Cross-team collaboration

Structured workflows

English communication

Kafka / platform knowledge

Tools

Apache Kafka

Job description

Brief info about Vinted

Our mission is to make second-hand the first choice, and we're looking for people who want to help us get there. Every day, we work together to help our members buy and sell pre-loved clothing and lifestyle items, giving each piece a second life - or even a third.
The Vinted Group is made up of three business units that support this mission:

Vinted Marketplace is Europe's leading platform for second-hand fashion and a go-to destination for all kinds of pre-loved items, with a growing range of categories. Our platform connects millions of members across 20+ markets, helping great items find a new life.

Vinted Go enhances the shipping experience with a vast network of over 500,000 pick-up and drop-off points, partnering with more than 60 carriers across Europe, with added services like item verification for peace of mind on high-value pieces.

Vinted Pay is the newest part of the Vinted Group, dedicated to bringing secure, reliable payments to buyers and sellers across Europe. Seamlessly integrated into the Vinted app, it helps keep every transaction safe, efficient, and easy for our members.

Founded in 2008 in Lithuania, Vinted began as a way for friends to find new homes for clothes they no longer needed. In 2019, we became Lithuania's first unicorn! Today, our headquarters remain in Vilnius, and we've grown with offices across Europe, supported by a team of over 2,000 people.

Information about the position

As an Engineering Manager for the Kafka team, you will lead an engineering team responsible for providing managed services, tooling, and standards for multiple Vinted product teams that need asynchronous message processing. This spans the full scope of the domain - from operating infrastructure and running Kafka clusters across multiple data centers, to abstracting complex systems into easy-to-use managed services that support core Vinted operations at scale.

Your main responsibility will be the health, morale, and efficiency of your team, ensuring they successfully operate and grow parts of the platform while developing "golden paths" for product developers.

The newly established Kafka team in the Persistence domain currently consists of 5 experienced engineers, with plans to grow further. In this role, you will report to the Director of Engineering and form a strong leadership partnership with the team's Staff Engineer, who leads deep technical architecture and technology choices, and Technical Program Manager (TPM), who drives cross-team delivery and roadmap alignment. Together, you will empower the team to deliver reliable, high-quality services to Vinted's wider development organization.

In this position, you'll

• Lead and develop a team of 5+ infrastructure engineers, driving individual goal setting, regular feedback cycles, and quarterly performance reviews.
• Build individual career development plans, mentoring engineers to reach their potential and supporting team growth.
• Keep track of team health, delivery velocity, and operational workload to prevent burnout and ensure a sustainable pace.
• Create, refine, and take accountability for efficient operational procedures, agile workflows, incident response routines, and on-call practices.
• Help unblock engineers, resolve cross-team dependencies, and foster strong collaboration with peer platform teams.
• Participate in engineering management rituals, organizational planning, post-incident reviews, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Oversee team execution, capacity planning, and hiring efforts as the team expands.
• Work with the Staff Engineer and TPM to turn technical strategy into well-structured roadmaps, clear team priorities, and predictable delivery.
• Communicate with internal stakeholders and development teams across Vinted to ensure transparent service expectations, SLAs, and roadmap visibility.
• Ensure the team delivers eventually consistent systems that keep data synchronized across cross-Atlantic markets without sacrificing performance.
• Focus on your team's and your own professional and personal growth, including conducting performance and compensation reviews.

About you

• Have experience managing, coaching, and developing software and/or infrastructure engineering teams, with a track record of delivering results.
• Have a strong understanding of goal-setting frameworks, performance review cycles, continuous feedback, and career growth pathways for engineers.
• Are comfortable collaborating in a leadership triad, partnering closely with a Staff Engineer on technical decisions and a TPM on program execution.
• Are skilled at creating structured workflows, clarifying team ownership, facilitating constructive discussions, and managing stakeholder expectations.
• Care deeply about people development, psychological safety, a healthy on-call culture, and team satisfaction.
• Are well-versed in high-level software engineering and platform concepts, enabling you to communicate effectively with technical specialists without needing to be hands-on.
• Communicate excellently in written and spoken English.
• Advantage:Experience working within platform, infrastructure, SRE, or cloud organizations.
• Advantage:Experience working within Apache Kafka or similar platforms.
• Advantage: Experience establishing or improving on-call rotations, incident post-mortem processes, or service-level management.

Work perks

• The opportunity to benefit from our share options programme
• 25 working days of holiday
• Access to all the tools & tech needed for work
• Home office support: we provide IT workstation equipment and a personal budget of up to €540 for home workplace furniture
• Private health insurance
• Confidential Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for you and your family
• Frequent team-building events
• A personal monthly budget for shopping on Vinted
• A dog-friendly office
• In Vilnius office: gym & in-house meals at friendly prices
• In Kaunas office: a monthly lunch allowance, and a once-a-week provided in-house lunch and breakfast

Working at Vinted

Workation policy

Better balance holidays with workdays by working remotely! Up to 90 days per year in the EU, of these, 21 days can be spent globally. For non-EU citizens, it's 21 days worldwide. This can be combined with time off for vacation or personal time.

Individual learning budget

Each year, you'll be given a learning budget (starting at €3,000), and a total of up to 10 working days over a 2-year period to support your personal and professional development.

Hybrid work

Our hybrid model, with 2 recommended office days a week, gives you and your team the flexibility to decide if and when you want to work from home, and when to catch up in person.

Equal opportunity

We welcome applications from everybody, regardless of your background, identity, or life experiences. Job openings come with guides, not checklists. If you're excited about a role, but don't identify with every point in the 'About you' section, apply anyway - you might still be the perfect match!

The annual gross salary range for this position excluding 8% holiday pay is:

€100.300-€121.400 EUR