Engineering Manager (Team Lead) - 2 squads

Rotterdam Innovation City; Netherlands; Hybrid; EUR 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Rotterdam office three days a week

Job summary

C Teleport is seeking a Lead to head two squads, owning both technical direction and people leadership while staying hands‑on in the code. You will connect with the Product Owner across the company and partner with stakeholders from our Rotterdam office.

This role blends leadership with coding, focusing on Billing and Back Office squads, roadmapping incremental MVPs, and ensuring production stability in a fast‑growing travel‑tech environment.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of active software engineering with deep, current .NET / C# expertise — this needs to be your active day‑to‑day stack now, not a language you used earlier in your career.
• 2+ years of current‑full‑scope people management as an Engineering Manager, meaning you've personally run recurring 1:1s, hired, and managed underperformance through to a resolution, including an exit where needed. A lead or architect title without this substance isn't enough.
• Strong hands‑on coding background, you'd rather write code than avoid it.
• You use AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor's agent mode, or similar) as a daily driver, not just autocomplete, instead being comfortable directing agentic workflows, and ready to bring that fluency to how your team works, not only how you personally code.
• Solid grasp of architectural patterns, SOLID, TDD, DDD, Event Sourcing and CQRS; practical experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and message brokers (RabbitMQ or similar); hands‑on with microservices and Docker.
• Based in the Netherlands and able to work from our Rotterdam office 3 days per week. (We can sponsor highly‑skilled‑migrant candidates already in, or relocating to, the NL; we do not relocate candidates currently based outside the country.)

Responsibilities

• Own the squad’s technical direction from design decisions through to implementation and delivery.
• Lead delivery outcomes to ensure reliable, complete solutions and production readiness.
• Stay hands‑on: contribute production code, lead reviews, and know the system deeply.
• Partner with the Product Owner to shape the roadmap and break work into incremental MVPs.
• Challenge estimates, surface risks early, safeguard production stability, and keep incidents and support tickets inside SLA.
• Enforce coding standards, reduce technical debt, and evaluate new technology with Architects Group.
• Line‑manage engineers: 1:1s, feedback, growth plans, and performance management.

Skills

7+ years in software engineering (C#,.

2+ years engineering manager

Hands-on coding

AI coding agents daily

Architectural patterns (SOLID, TDD, Dn

PostgreSQL

RabbitMQ

Docker

Net/C# stacks

Net microservices

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

PostgreSQL

RabbitMQ

Job description

You will lead one of two squads that run C Teleport's most business-critical domains; and as we scale, we're hiring a Lead for each. This is a leadership role with two halves that come together in one person: you own the technical direction of your squad and stay hands‑on in the code, and you own the people. You build the team, grow it, and are accountable for how everyone in it performs.

At C Teleport we are transforming corporate travel by combining automation, machine learning and pragmatic engineering. As a squad Lead, you are your squad's connection to the wider company; the technical counterpart to your squad's Product Owner, who is also based in our Rotterdam office, and a trusted partner to the teams whose work depends on yours.

The two squads that you'll lead one

Billing Squad: invoicing, payments, reconciliation, VAT and revenue recognition across multiple jurisdictions. It sits at the intersection of travel, finance and engineering, and its work is felt directly on the company's revenue — when money is involved, there's no margin for error, and that precision bar is what makes this domain worth owning.

Back Office, Integration & Ecosystem Squad: the integration layer that connects C Teleport to the software our customers already run, plus the APIs and ecosystem surface through which outside systems, and increasingly AI tools, plug into the platform. The mission: make data flow automatically so manual re-keying disappears.

What you’ll own (both squads)

Technical leadership

• Own the squad’s technical direction, from design decisions through to the implementation itself.

• Own the squad’s delivery outcomes to ensure the team ships reliable, complete solutions and follows through to production.

• Stay hands‑on: contribute production code, lead reviews, and know the system deeply.

• Partner with the Product Owner to shape the roadmap and break work into incremental MVPs, shaping solutions, not accepting requirements blindly.

• Challenge estimates, surface risks early, safeguard production stability, and keep incidents and support tickets inside SLA.

• Enforce coding standards, reduce technical debt, and evaluate new technology with the Architects Group.

People leadership

• Line‑manage the engineers in the squad: this is real, all-round people management, not a title.

• Own hiring for the squad: define the need, interview, and make the call.

• Run regular 1:1s, give direct feedback, and build each engineer’s growth path.

• Own performance end‑to‑end: recognise and stretch strong performers, and address underperformance directly, including the difficult conversations and, where it comes to it, managing someone out.

• Set and hold the bar for how the squad works together, and promote a culture of "agree or disagree, but commit."

This is not…

• Not a hands‑off management role. You will still design, review, and write production code every week.

• Not a pure IC or architect role. You are accountable for people and for delivery, not only for the code. If you are looking to step back from management, or to step back from coding, this is not the role.

• Not a role where "leading engineers" was a title without the substance. If your team‑lead experience didn't include running your own 1:1s, hiring, and personally handling underperformance, this role will feel like a bigger jump than it looks on paper.

Contract type

This role starts as a fixed‑term contract, and permanent contract will be offered once the confidence of long‑term collaboration is well established. If you need a permanent contract from day one, this isn't the right fit for you right now — for everyone else, it's the standard structure we use to make sure it's a genuine two‑way fit before we commit long‑term.

Must‑haves (these are gates)

• 7+ of your most recent years in software engineering with deep, current .NET / C# expertise — this needs to be your active day‑to‑day stack now, not a language you used earlier in your career.

• 2+ years of current‑full‑scope people management as an Engineering Manager, meaning you've personally run recurring 1:1s, hired, and managed underperformance through to a resolution, including an exit where needed. A lead or architect title without this substance isn't enough.

• Strong hands‑on coding background, you'd rather write code than avoid it.

• You use AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor's agent mode, or similar) as a daily driver, not just autocomplete, instead being comfortable directing agentic workflows, and ready to bring that fluency to how your team works, not only how you personally code.

• Solid grasp of architectural patterns, SOLID, TDD, DDD, Event Sourcing and CQRS; practical experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and message brokers (RabbitMQ or similar); hands‑on with microservices and Docker.

• Based in the Netherlands and able to work from our Rotterdam office 3 days per week. (We can sponsor highly‑skilled‑migrant candidates already in, or relocating to, the NL; we do not relocate candidates currently based outside the country.)

Nice to have (bonus, genuinely not required)

• For Billing: billing, invoicing, payments, ERP integration or other finance‑related products; familiarity with VAT/GST, accounting principles or revenue recognition.

• For Back Office / Integration & Ecosystem: building and owning APIs, webhooks, or platform/integration products; connecting to enterprise finance/HR/scheduling systems; driving external partner/supplier integrations to live deployment.

• Experience with AWS or Kubernetes.

Tech stack

C#, .NET, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, AWS; alongside Docker, Redis, Elasticsearch and other supporting services across the wider platform.

The squad

Each is a small, lean and focused team working remotely across European time zones, with you connecting it to the wider company from our Rotterdam office. You report to the CTO and work alongside a Tech Lead.

What we offer

• A hands‑on technical leadership role with significant ownership of a business‑critical domain.

• Hybrid working from our Rotterdam office, three days a week; close to your Product Owner and the cross‑department stakeholders whose work depends on the squad, so the tightest collaboration happens in person.

• Professional growth in a fast‑moving company at the intersection of travel, finance and engineering.

Hiring process

1. Recruiter / HR call — role, motivation, logistics.

2. Short technical video call.

3. Technical challenge / interview.

4. Meet the CTO.

Target: ~3–4 weeks end to end.

Pre‑employment screening

If your application is successful, we may conduct a pre‑employment screening through a trusted third party, in line with applicable laws — this may include employment history, education, and other relevant publicly available information to help us understand your suitability for the role.

C Teleport is an equal‑opportunity employer. We assess every application on merit and handle your data in line with GDPR.