Engineering Manager - Backend

Required Qualifications

• 7–10 years of engineering experience, with at least 3 years leading teams.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems design: idempotency, retries, DLQs, circuit breakers, eventual consistency, you've had to debug these in production.
• Proven experience with event-driven architecture and Kafka including schema design, consumer group management, and failure recovery patterns.
• Comfort with relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis, ) databases  including query optimisation and schema design decisions at scale.
• You've designed or operated systems handling meaningful traffic  ideally 10K+ RPS. significant daily transaction volumes, or consumer-scale user bases (1M+ users)
• You understand what 99.99% uptime actually costs to maintain and you've made the infrastructure and on-call decisions to back it.
• You've written or enforced SLOs, SLAs, and incident management processes.
• You've done a postmortem that changed something real about how the team operates.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure beyond just deploying services, cost optimisation, right-sizing, architecture decisions that meaningfully reduced spend
• Working knowledge of containerisation (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) enough to unblock your team.
• CI/CD pipeline ownership  you've built or significantly improved a pipeline.
• Experience with observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, or equivalent  and more importantly, a philosophy about what to instrument and why
• You've made the call between monolith and microservices  and you can defend it with context.
• You've managed technical debt consciously: triaged it, prioritised it, and made the case to stakeholders for when to pay it down
• You've navigated a hard conversation with a product or business stakeholder  and changed the outcome
• Your engineers grow under you. You can point to people you've promoted, coached, or unblocked
• You know how to build alignment across functions where incentives don't naturally align
• You have clear examples of decisions you made under ambiguity  and you can articulate the trade-offs you weighed
• You've identified a systemic problem and fixed it without being asked
• You've built or rebuilt something that wasn't working  a team, a process, a system