Engineering Manager
$31,200–$31,200 year
On-siteLondon, England, United Kingdom
Job Summary
Lead a newly established engineering pod focused on Employer Experience, defining roles, managing hiring, and driving delivery outcomes for autonomous teams. Manage a second pod on internal tooling through a Tech Lead, maintaining clear boundaries while overseeing people growth, wellbeing, and cross-pod escalations. Build and own incident management practices, enforce sound technical foundations, and adopt AI-assisted development norms across both pods. Partner closely with Product to ensure work is properly framed before it starts, pushing back on ambiguous requirements. This role operates within a bootstrapped edtech business building an AI platform for workforce education, supported by direct access to senior leadership.
Required Qualifications
- Proven experience managing software engineers: 1:1s, growth planning, and performance management, including the difficult conversations
- Sufficiently hands-on in a modern web stack to lead design discussions, review code effectively, and contribute meaningfully
- Track record of leading delivery in an agile environment: running ceremonies, managing flow, and shipping reliably against commitments
- Active engagement with AI-assisted development tools and leading adoption of them
- Experience hiring and onboarding engineers
- Strong written communication: you can write a proposal, a decision record, or a stakeholder update for a business, tech, or leadership audience
- Comfortable representing engineering realities honestly to Product and senior leadership, including when delivering bad news
- Able to work directly with non-technical colleagues across curriculum, operations, and delivery to understand problems at their root
- Clean ownership. You can hold a boundary with a technical counterpart without either policing it or letting it blur
- Comfortable with ambiguity. Our pod model is real but still maturing. You make good decisions with incomplete information and know when to escalate versus when to proceed
- Outcome ownership over activity. You question whether the work is the right work, not just whether the team can deliver it
- Collaboration without ego. You care about the outcome more than the credit, and you build trust through competence and consistency
- Communicative by default. You surface problems early and keep people appropriately informed without being prompted
- Location: Home based, UK (with occasional travel to London office)
- Hours: 37.5 per week
Desired Qualifications
- Professional experience with Python, React, or Vue is a bonus, not a requirement
- Experience operating in a pod- or squad-based organisational model
- Experience building in a bootstrapped or resource-constrained business
- Genuine interest in education, apprenticeships, and online learning
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