Engineering Manager

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for an Engineering Manager based in Netherlands. This role combines engineering leadership, technical depth, and people development within a globally distributed software organization. You will lead a team of engineers while remaining close enough to technology to challenge technical decisions and contribute to architecture discussions. The position focuses on turning ambitious product priorities into reliable execution, balancing delivery, quality, scalability, and technical health. You’ll work closely with Product, Engineering leadership, Principal Engineers, Platform, AI/ML, Security, and other stakeholders. Your leadership will help teams build ownership, improve engineering practices, and consistently deliver meaningful product outcomes. The role also offers exposure to complex challenges spanning global employment, payroll, compliance, automation, and AI. You’ll operate in a remote-first environment that values transparency, pragmatism, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Accountabilities: - Lead, coach, and develop a team of software engineers by setting clear expectations and supporting professional growth. - Own team delivery, execution, and engineering health while identifying risks and dependencies early. - Partner with Product to translate business priorities into clear, structured, and executable technical plans. - Maintain strong technical awareness and actively participate in architecture, design, and engineering discussions. - Work with Principal and Senior Engineers on complex technical decisions and architectural challenges. - Promote strong engineering practices across code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, security, and documentation. - Balance feature delivery with technical debt, scalability, reliability, and long-term engineering health.

- Use engineering effectiveness, delivery, quality, and reliability signals to identify bottlenecks and drive continuous improvement. - Build a culture of ownership and accountability in which engineers remain responsible for their work from design through production. - Support hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, and succession planning. - Identify blockers and coordinate effectively across teams to maintain delivery momentum. - Contribute to broader engineering initiatives and continuously improve development practices and ways of working. Requirements: - Several years of professional software engineering experience, including experience building and operating production systems. - Strong hands-on experience with Java and the broader Java ecosystem, with the ability to review and challenge technical implementations and architectural decisions. - Proven experience managing or leading software engineering teams. - Strong technical judgment and the ability to contribute meaningfully to architecture and technical discussions. - Experience with modern software development practices, Java-based backend systems, cloud-native architectures, APIs, distributed systems, and CI/CD. - Strong understanding of software quality, automated testing, observability, security, and operational excellence. - Experience using engineering effectiveness and delivery metrics such as DORA metrics, flow metrics, quality indicators, and reliability measures to understand team health and improve performance. - Practical understanding of AI-assisted and agentic software development, including experience with modern AI coding tools and agents. - Ability to help engineering teams adopt AI tools across development, testing, code review, documentation, and other stages of the software lifecycle. - Experience partnering closely with Product in an agile product-development environment. - Strong people-management capabilities, including coaching, feedback, performance management, and career development.