Engineering Manager

Description

The company is a Belgian HR tech and fintech scale-up with about 150 people. It is a challenger in employee benefits and flexible compensation, issuing meal, eco and gift vouchers and helping employers set up flexible pay packages such as cafeteria plans and mobility budgets, all on one multi-product platform that processes regulated payments.

Engineering is built around agentic coding. Engineers direct coding agents rather than only writing code. Skills, agents and context files are versioned and reviewed alongside the code, and standards and Architecture Decision Records are written so that both people and agents can use them.

Engineers join each initiative at discovery, working with Product and UX, and own its design, build, testing and after-care. There are two engineering teams, each led by an Engineering Manager. A Delivery Manager handles delivery timing, a Lead Architect owns the architecture direction and ADRs, and Principal Engineers act as the reference for each stack.

This role manages about 7 engineers in one of those two teams. You are the line manager, but you are not on the critical path of delivery. AI-generated code is held to the same quality bar as all other code.

Responsibilities

• Line-manage the software engineers in your team through regular one-to-ones. Make sure they have what they need, coach how they work and how productive they are, and address weak spots early.
• Develop each engineer beyond their output. Arrange training, pairing with more senior people, and stretch work such as leading a first project or a first discovery, and give them exposure to other parts of the stack.
• Set objectives and run mid-year and annual reviews. Give feedback when it happens so that nothing comes as a surprise at review time.
• Propose promotions and pay changes, using the career ladder as the shared reference.
• Spot people risks such as holidays, departures, overload or knowledge held by one person, and deal with them before they affect delivery.
• Define with the CTO the profiles your team needs, run interviews and make the hiring decision together.
• Onboard new joiners on the products, standards, ADRs and ways of working, including agentic coding from day one, within the framework set by the Lead Architect.
• Keep the team balanced in seniority, avoid single points of failure on critical components, and make sure it has the capacity to deliver.
• Challenge and validate technical designs, estimates and proofs of concept before delivery. Bring in the Lead Architect when an initiative goes beyond the agreed ecosystem.
• Make sure the team delivers in line with the ADRs and quality standards. Enforce real code reviews that cover build, tests and attempts to break the code, and no merge without tests. Hold AI-generated code to the same bar.
• When a problem is architectural, start the discussion with the Lead Architect. You do not drive it, but you make sure it begins.
• Make the team own its after-care: a weekly support rotation, runbooks updated after each incident, and a healthy balance between run work and delivery.
• Make agentic coding part of each engineer's objectives, reviews and productivity coaching. The Lead Architect sets the direction and the Principal Engineers build the tooling; you drive adoption one engineer at a time.
• Pass the team's real pain points to the Lead Architect and Principal Engineers. Track adoption and impact indicators such as usage, cycle time, rework and quality, and act on what they show.
• Keep engineers accountable for every line they merge, whether AI-generated or not, and apply extra care to critical code such as security, payments and card data.
• Attend the recurring engineering steering with the CTO, Delivery Manager, Lead Architect and the other Engineering Manager, covering status, staffing, people risks, tech debt and trade-offs on scope and quality.
• Keep both teams aligned with the other Engineering Manager on practices and quality bar, so engineers can move between teams.
• Delivery planning belongs to the Delivery Manager, architecture direction to the Lead Architect, and product priorities to Product. You propose promotions and pay changes, and the CTO makes the final decision.
• Your core responsibility is that each engineer grows, the team ships to standard, and coding agents become part of everyone's daily work.

Requirements

• You have managed a software engineering team of around 5 to 10 engineers, ideally after working as a software engineer or tech lead.
• You use coding agents every day and have helped a team adopt them. You understand how they affect productivity, code review and quality control.
• You are technically credible. You can read and challenge a design, a pull request or an estimate, and you can still write code on the company stack (PHP/Laravel, Vue/TypeScript, React Native) when useful, for pairing, proofs of concept or unblocking someone.
• You coach, give direct feedback and handle difficult conversations, including performance improvement plans. You have hired and onboarded engineers.
• You care about quality and measure it. You know code review, the test pyramid, CI and ADRs, and you use indicators to ask the right questions rather than to replace your judgment.
• Experience in regulated environments such as payments, PCI DSS or ISO 27001 is a plus.
• Engineers trust your technical judgment, even though coding is not your main activity.
• You are kind but not soft. You tell people hard truths, give and ask for direct feedback, and do not avoid friction by letting problems slide.
• You develop people. You care how each engineer learns and grows, not only what they deliver.
• You are structured and use data to inform decisions, without letting it replace judgment.

Conditions

You get 30 days off a year: 20 legal public holidays, 6 ADV/RTT days and 4 Monidayzz days.

Homeworking is flexible, with several days of remote work per week and a monthly allowance to set up your workspace.

You can work from abroad for up to 4 weeks a year, once you have completed 6 months at the company.

Benefits

• Your purchasing power is optimised, and this applies to both clients and employees.
• A mobility budget or a company car.
• A monthly homeworking allowance.
• Hospitalisation insurance covering your health and your family's health.
• Unlimited learning opportunities, including languages, personal growth and technical skills.
• Regular chances to move to another role or department inside the company.
• A yearly trip with all colleagues to celebrate what the company has achieved.
• The company is in a phase of redesigning its engineering organisation. You will help shape a new role and lead a team moving from developers who write code to engineers who lead their agents.
• Two outcomes are always valid: change the standard, or follow it. If you want to keep the first open and the second clear, get in touch.