Founding Eng Manager - Developer Experience (Remote)

Pliant; Germany (OH); On-site; USD 138,000 - 207,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Monthly mobility benefit

Wellhub Membership

Pliant Card with monthly credit

Remote work flexibility

Job summary

Pliant, a European fintech, seeks an Engineering Manager for Developer Experience. You will define and lead a brand-new platform engineering team, owning the golden path, CI/CD tooling, and self-service environments.

Initially hands-on, you’ll shape the team and drive architectural decisions to empower product squads. You will report to the engineering leadership and build from zero, recruiting, setting culture, and defining the technical bar as the team grows.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software development experience with Python, including 2+ years in leadership/management.
• Hands-on experience building CI/CD systems, internal developer portals, or golden paths, with enough codebase familiarity to still be useful.
• You can read a Helm chart, write a Kubernetes admission webhook, and debug a GitHub Actions runner issue.
• You do not need to be the fastest IC on the team, but engineers need to trust your technical calls.
• Deep experience with Kubernetes-based platforms specifically, including cluster APIs, namespaces, RBAC, admission control, and deployment patterns well enough to make informed decisions.
• A product mindset for internal tooling.
• Experience hiring engineers, including at least one hire that taught you something.
• Security-first thinking that shows up in the design, not just the vocabulary.
• Fintech or regulated-environment experience is a genuine advantage. We operate under PCI DSS and SOC2.
• The product teams run Java and Kotlin, and they'll come to you when something breaks. You don't need to write Java.

Responsibilities

• You coach engineers who haven't made the shift yet and set the bar for how the team uses AI tools.
• Own the golden path: build deployment templates, CI/CD patterns on top of Kubernetes APIs, readiness checklists, onboarding flows.
• Own developer satisfaction as a metric: track adoption, deployment lead time, and time-to-first-deploy.
• Standardise AI-assisted development tooling: lead the team building the AI harness across the company.
• Build the team from zero: own hiring, culture, and the technical bar from the first hire.

Skills

Python

Leadership

Go

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Helm

GitHub Actions

Tools

Terraform

Spacelift

Datadog

AWS

Job description

Pliant, a European fintech, seeks an Engineering Manager for Developer Experience. You will define and lead a brand-new platform engineering team, owning the golden path, CI/CD tooling, and self-service environments.

Initially hands-on, you’ll shape the team and drive architectural decisions to empower product squads. You will report to the engineering leadership and build from zero, recruiting, setting culture, and defining the technical bar as the team grows.