(Group) Engineering Manager

Description

The company set out to fix how big banks serve small businesses, which were slow and often could not get the credit and tools they needed. It is now a financial platform offering a business credit card, an SME spend management platform, a savings product that reached £1 billion in funds within its first year, and a growing set of tools and financial products for running a small business.

The company has over 1,000 employees, around £20bn in annual card spend and more than 200,000 customers. It has over 17,000 Trustpilot reviews averaging 4.7 stars and is profitable.

This is a hybrid role. The Engineering team works from the London (Moorgate) office 2 days per week.

You will manage the health, delivery and direction of several product engineering teams and the Team Leads who run them. You will act as a true product partner, since the teams exist to build features and propositions that create new commercial revenue, win new customers and grow revenue from existing ones. Success is measured by the leaders you develop, turning Team Leads into confident managers who run their teams without daily oversight.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with Product and other stakeholders to identify and deliver features and propositions that open new revenue streams and deepen revenue from existing customers.
• Shape the 3 to 12 month roadmap, presenting technical investment in terms of commercial impact, customer value and risk.
• Keep the customer at the centre of every roadmap discussion and judge projects by how well they solve real customer problems.
• Shape the architecture of your teams' systems so that technical choices are scalable, resilient, cost-effective and sustainable.
• Set standards with technical leaders, reduce complexity and steer teams away from over-engineered solutions.
• Make sound build-versus-buy and technical debt decisions, weighing them against product needs.
• Lead, coach and develop Team Leads, helping them manage and grow their own direct reports.
• Own predictable, iterative and sustainable delivery of quarterly objectives across your teams.
• Tackle underperformance directly and support Team Leads through complex people issues with integrity and clarity.
• Spot and reduce risks 3 to 6 months ahead, including dependencies and resource gaps.
• Contribute to company-wide initiatives such as recruitment strategy and organisational design.

Requirements

• Strong product and commercial judgement, with a record of delivering features or propositions that created new revenue or grew existing revenue.
• A customer-focused, commercially aware approach that uses data to guide decisions.
• Proven ability to set direction in software architecture and system design, challenge designs and weigh trade-offs between scalability, cost and maintainability.
• Experience managing managers or Team Leads and growing them into senior leaders.
• A strong record in people management, including hiring, developing people and managing performance.
• A solid technical background and a working understanding of how full-stack teams and codebases operate. The team uses.NET and React, but your specific stack experience is not a strict requirement.
• A track record of leading and delivering complex, cross-team projects.
• Clear, concise communication that adapts from engineers to senior leadership.
• Calm, steady leadership through ambiguity and fast organisational growth.
• Experience in a scaling, regulated, fintech or tech-enabled environment is a plus.

Conditions

Hybrid working, with the Engineering team in the London (Moorgate) office 2 days per week.

28 days holiday plus bank holidays.

Interview process: a 30 minute intro and values call with your Talent Partner (video), a 60 minute technical and management interview with a Senior Engineering Manager (video), a 60 minute system design interview with the engineering team (video), and a final stage of 120 minutes in total: a 60 minute case study with Product and the Engineering Team, plus a 60 minute Good to Great interview with the CTO (in person).

The company aims to respond to applications within 3 working days, and up to 5 working days during busy periods.

Equal opportunity: candidates are considered without regard to protected characteristics.

Benefits

• Octopus EV salary sacrifice scheme.
• Annual learning and wellbeing budget.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• Cycle to Work scheme.
• Season ticket loan.
• 6 free therapy sessions per year.
• Dog-friendly offices.
• Free drinks and snacks in the offices.