Engineering Manager

La Redoute; Leiria; Hybrid; EUR 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

La Redoute in Portugal (Leiria) seeks an Engineering Manager to lead a backend team responsible for core e-commerce services. You will balance delivery with long‑term health, guiding architecture and improving system health while growing autonomous engineers across a distributed team in France, Malta, and Portugal.

You’ll collaborate with Product Owners and business teams, shaping technical priorities and reducing operational overhead to improve reliability and scalability.

Qualifications

• Experience leading backend teams in production.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, APIs, and SOA.
• Experience in e-commerce systems (payments, orders, checkout) and catalog/search.

Responsibilities

• Lead a backend team to ensure clear expectations and reliable delivery.
• Deliver and maintain critical e‑commerce services with high availability.
• Improve scalability, resilience, and observability across domains.
• Improve team autonomy and reduce operational overhead.
• Foster ownership and accountability, surfacing issues early.
• Provide architectural and performance guidance as needed.
• Balance short-term delivery with long-term sustainability.
• Influence the technical direction of the domain and documentation.

Skills

Backend leadership

Distributed systems

APIs

SOA

People development

Product alignment

AI curiosity

Tools

Java

Kafka

Kubernetes

Job description

Do you want a job that matches your ambition and your lifestyle?

Read on to discover the profile we're looking for!

From its beginnings as a wool mill, La Redoute is a French brand that has forged unique relationships with its customers for the past 180 years – yesterday through its catalogue, today on the web. We are a mainly digital player, selling fashion as well as home decoration.

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a backend team responsible for a core part of our e-commerce platform.

Your mission is to help the team deliver consistently while improving system health over time. You’ll balance short-term delivery with long-term sustainability, making clear and intentional tradeoffs.

This role goes beyond managing delivery. You’ll shape how the team operates, improving predictability, reducing operational overhead, and helping engineers grow into more autonomous and effective contributors.

You’ll lead a distributed team across France, Malta, and Portugal, driving alignment, ownership, and continuous improvement.

What you’ll be accountable for

• Lead a team of backend engineers (including external partners), ensuring clarity of expectations, strong collaboration, and consistent delivery

• Be responsible for the delivery and reliability of critical e-commerce services

• Improve scalability, resilience, and observability across the systems the team owns

• Help the team become more autonomous by improving how they work and reducing operational overhead

• Foster a culture of ownership and accountability, where issues are surfaced and addressed early

• Provide technical guidance on architecture, code quality, and performance when needed

• Manage technical debt pragmatically, balancing speed with long-term sustainability

• Contribute to the technical direction of the domain and help evolve it over time

• Improve transparency by ensuring decisions, processes, and system knowledge are clearly documented and easy to access

What you bring

• Experience managing backend engineering teams in production environments

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, and service-oriented architectures

• Experience in e-commerce systems, including transactional domains (payments, orders, checkout) and catalog/search platforms

• Proven ability to balance delivery with long-term system health

• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and making tradeoffs under pressure

• Track record of developing engineers and building high-performing teams

• Experience working closely with Product Owners, Product Managers and business teams, turning business needs into clear technical priorities

• Familiarity with our stack: Java, Kafka and Kubernetes. These are not mandatory engineers coming from other backend technologies are very welcome

• Curiosity about AI and how it can help engineers work better and improve our products