Job description
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Senior Engineering Manager
Company Overview
Cleverbridge is the smarter way to sell globally. As a premium Merchant of Record (MoR), we simplify global software sales by combining powerful platform capabilities — including payments, subscriptions, taxes, and compliance — with expert services that fuel growth across the entire customer lifecycle. From onboarding and implementation to ongoing optimization and strategic guidance, our team works as an extension of our clients', helping them remove friction, reduce risk, and expand into new markets with confidence.
Job Summary
The Product & Engineering team at Cleverbridge is fundamental to the successful execution of the company’s strategy. We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager who will serve as a key operational leader within our engineering organization. This is not a pure people-management role. It is a hands-on leadership position focused on building and sustaining the systems, practices, and accountability structures that make engineering teams effective at scale.
You will partner closely with the VP of Engineering to drive operational excellence across multiple teams. Your primary focus will be ensuring that engineering execution is structured, predictable, and continuously improving — while also developing the engineering managers who report to you into stronger, more autonomous leaders.
Key Responsibilities
Operational Leadership
- Own the output and operational health of multiple engineering teams: delivery predictability, quality metrics, incident response maturity, and production reliability.
- Establish and maintain structured planning, execution tracking, and retrospective practices that create genuine transparency — not reporting theatre.
- Drive cross-team coordination on initiatives that span multiple teams, ensuring dependencies are managed proactively and delivery commitments are realistic.
- Identify and resolve systemic execution problems: unclear ownership, recurring delivery slippage, unstructured technical debt accumulation, or weak feedback loops.
- Support P&E leadership in maintaining a culture that promotes accountability, transparency and innovative thinking.
- Engage with other Cleverbridge leaders as a senior P&E representative, building strong relationships cross functionally.
Technical Partnership
- Participate in architecture reviews across teams and contribute an independent, well-grounded technical opinion — particularly on changes that affect reliability, payment flows, compliance boundaries, or platform coherence.
- Engage at the code and design level in cross-team technical discussions: read pull requests where it matters, challenge design decisions on substance, and help teams converge on sound solutions.
- Nice to have: occasionally build small tools, prototypes, or reference implementations that can be used as challenges or accelerators for the teams — as a way to keep the technical muscle sharp and raise the bar.
Engineering Manager Development
- Directly manage and coach a group of Engineering Managers, raising their capability from tactical team operators to leaders who work on the system, not just in it.
- Set clear expectations for EM performance: team health, delivery outcomes, stakeholder communication, and professional development of their engineers.
- Create accountability structures that make it visible when teams are thriving and when they are struggling — early enough to act, not after the fact.
Engineering Effectiveness
- Own and drive improvements to engineering practices: CI/CD pipeline health, release processes, QA automation strategy, code review standards, and development workflow efficiency.
- Use data to inform decisions: build or improve dashboards and metrics that track engineering throughput, quality, and operational health without creating a measurement bureaucracy.
- Partner with the VP of Engineering and CTO on platform evolution and technical strategy, translating strategic direction into executable plans at the team level.
Strategic Contribution
- Contribute to engineering strategy and organizational design discussions, bringing an operational lens grounded in what actually works on the ground.
- Support executive communication by providing clear, honest status on delivery health, risks, and trade-offs — framed for business audiences, not just technical ones.
- Help shape the engineering narrative for board-level and investor-facing discussions, contributing to the broader value creation story around engineering effectiveness and operational maturity.
Requirements / Qualifications
- 8+ years in software engineering, with at least 4 years in engineering management leading multiple teams or managing managers.
- Strong engineering background: you started your career as a software engineer and have retained the technical depth to read code, assess architecture, and contribute meaningfully to architecture reviews and cross-team design discussions — even if you no longer code daily.
- Demonstrated track record of improving engineering operational health: delivery predictability, incident response, production reliability, or development process maturity.
- Experience coaching and developing engineering managers — not just managing engineers directly.
- Comfort working with data to assess team health and drive decisions, without reducing everything to vanity metrics.
- Strong communication skills: ability to frame engineering realities for non-technical stakeholders clearly and honestly.
- Experience in a B2B SaaS or platform environment where reliability, compliance, and operational discipline matter.
- Must demonstrate strong commercial awareness, understanding how product and engineering decisions align with business priorities and financial outcomes.
- Experienced using AI in development cycles preferred.
- Pragmatic leadership style: you lead through clarity, structure, and accountability — not micromanagement or control.
Strong Differentiators
- Experience in payments, fintech, or e-commerce platforms where transactional accuracy and regulatory compliance are non-negotiable.
- Experience operating in a PE-backed or exit-oriented environment where engineering effectiveness is part of the value creation thesis.
- Track record of building or significantly improving engineering effectiveness programs: metrics frameworks, delivery health dashboards, structured planning cadences.
- Familiarity with both legacy monolith environments and modern distributed architectures — and the patience required to evolve one into the other.
- Experience working in European engineering organizations, including navigating works council or co-determination structures.
