Engineering Manager (DevEx)

About the team

The Local DevEx team within the Foundations group empowers engineers to develop, test, and ship high-quality services quickly and confidently. We own and evolve the local developer experience across the DoorDash group of companies via a paved-path DevContainers-based development platform for engineers & agentic workflows, with related IDE tooling. The team’s mission is to enable engineers across the engineering pillars of Quality, Velocity and Efficiency by building framework-level tooling and developer flows that scale across the company.

About the role

This is a People Management role — you will be the seasoned manager of a high-impact engineering team, expected to drive delivery and ensure operational excellence. However, you will also be technically credible enough to review designs, TDDs and PRs for the most complex systems your teams own. These expectations reflect what we define for an L6 Engineering Manager at Deliveroo.

What you'll be doing

Technical Leadership

• Define and evolve DevBox as the paved path for development, including AI dev tooling, JetBrains remote IDE backends, and remote VM lifecycles. Own developer flows, documentation, and onboarding UX so engineers can get productive quickly and securely

• Measure and improve adoption, time-to-first-change, and developer feedback for DevBox workflows; reduce friction for day-to-day developer tasks.

• Own the integration and productisation of Devbox ai (Claude Code) and optional MCP connectors (Glean), ensuring developer privacy, IP safety, and a robust, auditable AI tooling path.

• Own the technical and delivery outcomes for the team within the wider company: set priorities, break complex projects into iterative deliverables, and ensure on-time, high-quality delivery.

• Partner with Staff+ Engineers to shape technical direction and ensure architecture, design docs (TDDs) and PR reviews meet group standards; personally review the most complex designs and PRs.

• Drive planning, risk management and estimation practices so your team(s) sustain a high but healthy output pace.

• Set the standards for Operational Excellence in the team - ensure clear SLOs/SLA thinking, strong monitoring, low-noise alerting, maintained on-call rotas and clear runbooks. Lead incident responses, follow-ups and long-term preventative work.

Collaboration & organisational impact

• Represent your team in group planning; communicate roadmap, trade-offs and risk to non-adjacent teams and business stakeholders. Build strong relationships with Product Engineering, Security, SRE and IT.

• Help improve engineering practices across the group — e.g., ways of working, reliability standards, and developer experience for platform teams

Team Building & People Management

• Line-manage, coach and develop engineers across levels; provide regular, constructive feedback and structured career progression. Cultivate psychological safety, high trust and strong team culture.

• Proactively identify and resolve low-performance, and raise the hiring/interviewing bar through hands-on interviewing and contribution to hiring processes.

Requirements

• Experience shipping CLI tooling, developer workstations, devcontainer workflows, or remote IDE/VM orchestration. Familiar with remote execution and caching patterns (e.g., BuildBuddy / remote executors), snapshotting concepts and tradeoffs for stateful VMs

• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted developer tooling or LLM integrations (on-device or code-local assistants such as Claude Code), and knowledge of safe-by-design practices for developer LLM tooling.

• Familiarity with JetBrains Remote / IntelliJ backend flows and lifecycle, Firecracker-style snapshotting or lightweight VM snapshotting approaches, and large cache / remote execution optimisation.

• Experience with managed software distribution systems (Managed Software Center) or large enterprise desktop provisioning.

• Background with languages/tooling used for developer tooling CLIs (Go, Python, TypeScript) and infra as code

• Good understanding of networking & secure access patterns (Tailscale or similar VPNs), secrets management (Vault), and platform integrations

• Proven experience managing and developing high-performing engineering teams delivering production systems.

• Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, platform/infrastructure engineering, cloud networking and production-grade services. Comfortable reviewing designs/TDDs and contributing code when needed.

• Experience driving operational excellence (SLOs, on-call, runbooks, post-incident reviews).

• Excellent communication skills and a track record of aligning multiple teams to solve ambiguous, cross-team problems.

Why Deliveroo

Our mission is to transform the way you shop and eat, bringing the neighbourhood to your door by connecting consumers, restaurants, shops and riders. We are transforming the way the world eats and shops by making access to food and products more convenient and enjoyable. We give people the opportunity to buy what they want, as they want it, when and where they want it.

We are a technology-driven company at the forefront of the most rapidly expanding industry in the world. We are still a small team, making a very large impact, looking to answer some of the most interesting questions out there. We move fast, value autonomy and ownership, and we are always looking for new ideas.

Workplace & Benefits

At Deliveroo we know that people are the heart of the business and we prioritise their welfare. Benefits differ by country, but we offer many benefits in areas including healthcare, well-being, parental leave, pensions, and generous annual leave allowances, including time off to support a charitable cause of your choice. Benefits are country-specific, please ask your recruiter for more information.

Diversity

At Deliveroo, we believe a great workplace is one that represents the world we live in and how beautifully diverse it can be. That means we have no judgement when it comes to any one of the things that make you who you are - your gender, race, sexuality, religion or a secret aversion to coriander. All you need is a passion for (most) food and a desire to be part of one of the fastest-growing businesses in a rapidly growing industry.

We are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion in all aspects of our hiring process. We recognise that some candidates may require adjustments to apply for a position or fairly participate in the interview process. If you require any adjustments, please don't hesitate to let us know. We will make every effort to provide the necessary adjustments to ensure you have an equitable opportunity to succeed.