Engineering Manager

What You'll Do

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of 5–6 engineers across different levels. 

• Set clear performance expectations, run structured 1:1s, and own career development for your reports. 

• Build and maintain a high-trust, psychologically safe team culture. 

• Provide technical mentorship and coaching to help engineers grow in Java, cloud, and distributed systems. 

• Own the planning, prioritization, and on-time delivery of engineering commitments for your team. 

• Drive agile processes (sprint planning, retrospectives, estimation) without letting process become overhead. 

• Remove blockers, manage cross-team dependencies, and escalate risks early. 

• Hold the team accountable to quality, velocity, and reliability targets. 

• Translate business requirements into appropriate technical solutions, keeping simplicity at the core. 

• Conduct meaningful code reviews for Java-based backend services, ensuring quality, maintainability, and adherence to engineering standards. 

• Design and architect highly scalable, cloud-native enterprise software applications. 

• Work hands-on with Java, J2EE, Spring, REST APIs, and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) to contribute to architecture and critical design decisions. 

• Guide the team in debugging complex distributed system issues across Kafka, MongoDB, and microservices. 

• Research, evaluate, and recommend technologies required for solution delivery. 

• Work closely with engineers to design solutions to security problems and monitor vulnerabilities in third-party components. 

• Maximise performance, uptime, and supportability of the product. 

• Provide technical oversight across backend architecture, API design, and distributed systems. 

• Guide architectural decisions, code quality standards, and engineering best practices. 

• Partner with Principal and Lead engineers to define the long-term technical vision. 

• Ensure observability, security, performance, and reliability are treated as first-class concerns. 

• Champion DevOps and cloud infrastructure best practices across the team. 

• Work closely with Product Management to define requirements and shape the roadmap. 

• Translate business goals into clear engineering scope and realistic timelines. 

• Collaborate and communicate with stakeholders, providing project progress updates and highlighting risks with mitigation plans. 

• Interface with customer-facing functions to gather requirements and perform technical due diligence. 

What You’ll Bring

• 12+ years in Java server-side application development, with 3+ years in an engineering management role. 

• Strong hands-on Java and J2EE programming skills — this is a coding manager role. 

• Deep experience building and operating highly scalable SaaS products using Java, Spring, REST APIs, and relational/NoSQL databases. 

• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and modern DevOps practices. 

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and messaging systems (e.g., Kafka). 

• Experience with NoSQL databases, particularly MongoDB. 

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and the operational challenges of managing large-scale systems. 

• Proven ability to lead and grow engineering teams while remaining technically engaged. 

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to interact effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. 

• Familiarity with agile software development, preferably Scrum. 

• Experience in financial services, compliance, or regulated industries is a plus. 

• Experience with JavaScript-based UI technologies is a plus.