Engineering Manager, Kafka Platform

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

Benefits offered by this job

Share options programme

25 working days holiday

All the tools & tech needed for work

Home office budget up to €540 for home

Private health insurance

EAP for you and family

Frequent team-building events

Personal monthly budget for shopping

Dog-friendly office

In Vilnius office: gym & meals

In Kaunas office: lunch allowances

Job summary

Vinted is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Kafka team within the Persistence domain. You will manage 5+ infrastructure engineers, steer delivery, and translate technical strategy into scalable roadmaps across data centers and markets.

You will partner with the Staff Engineer and TPM, mentor engineers, and drive on-call and incident practices while ensuring clear SLAs and stakeholder alignment. This is a hybrid role focusing on people development and platform health.

Qualifications

• Experience managing and developing software/infrastructure teams.
• Strong goal-setting and performance-review skills.
• Leadership triad collaboration with Staff Engineer and TPM.
• Ability to create structured workflows and align stakeholders.
• Commitment to psychological safety and team satisfaction.
• Excellent written and spoken English.
• Advantage: experience in platform/infrastructure/SRE/cloud.
• Advantage: experience with Kafka or similar platforms.
• Advantage: experience with on-call rotations and post-mortems.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of 5+ infrastructure engineers, driving individual goal setting, regular feedback cycles, and quarterly performance reviews.
• Build career development plans, mentoring engineers to reach potential and supporting team growth.
• Keep track of team health, delivery velocity, and operational workload to prevent burnout.
• 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 collaboration with peer platform teams.
• Participate in engineering management rituals, organizational planning, post-incident reviews, and continuous improvement.
• Oversee team execution, capacity planning, and hiring as the team expands.
• Work with Staff Engineer and TPM to turn technical strategy into roadmaps and priorities.
• Communicate with internal stakeholders to ensure transparent service expectations and SLAs.

Skills

Team leadership

Engineering management

Career development

Stakeholder management

Cloud/platform concepts

English communication

Kafka experience

On-call rotations

Incident post-mortems

Tools

Apache Kafka

Job description

Vinted is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Kafka team within the Persistence domain. You will manage 5+ infrastructure engineers, steer delivery, and translate technical strategy into scalable roadmaps across data centers and markets.

You will partner with the Staff Engineer and TPM, mentor engineers, and drive on-call and incident practices while ensuring clear SLAs and stakeholder alignment. This is a hybrid role focusing on people development and platform health.