Senior Engineering Manager

ABOUT THE ROLE

We build and run a trading platform. The platform is mature and technically stable, this role is not about firefighting. It's about making the engineering organisation stronger and more predictable: how teams are staffed, how leads grow, how performance is assessed, and how decisions get made. Your domain is the organisation: leads, teams, hiring, structure, and the quality of decisions about who works on what.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own the engineering people cycle: 1-to-1s, feedback, performance and compensation reviews, PIPs with clear criteria and deadlines.
• Evaluate teams and leads: agree the right product and operational metrics and let them drive your decisions about people.
• Own people decisions: promotions, transfers, replacements and exits are yours to make and to stand behind publicly.
• Build leads, don't just manage them: set growth expectations, prepare successors, and close the gap where a lead isn't yet operating at the level the team needs.
• Hire ahead of the need: keep a live market pipeline of leads and senior engineers, and run leadership hiring with HR — profile, bar, final decision.
• Shape the org, not only the headcount: adjust structure and team composition as priorities and performance change, and rebalance people across teams and projects.
• Handle sensitive news properly: communicate exits, transfers and restructuring with HR — early, clearly, with the reasoning — so teams stay steady.
• Drive adoption of AI agents and LLM tooling across engineering, at every level, where they measurably improve speed or quality.
• Act as an independent voice when teams decide what to take into work.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 5+ years leading engineering teams: hiring, assessing performance, rotating people, and staffing them across projects.
• An engineering background: you have built product as an engineer and understand how development actually works from the inside.
• A record of building people processes and refining them: not inherited rituals, but processes you designed, ran and improved.
• Fluency in metrics: you read product and operational numbers, see what they say about a team, and act on them.
• A talent for making the abstract concrete: strategic intent becomes goals with owners, criteria and dates.
• High emotional intelligence: you earn the trust of strong technical leaders without competing on their ground.
• A genuine partnership with HR: you have worked shoulder to shoulder with HRBPs, not handed things over to them.
• Real curiosity about trading: either you know the domain, or you clearly want to learn it properly.