Engineering Manager - London

Engineering at hyperexponential

Our engineering department is a melting pot of some of the industry's brightest (and kindest!) engineers.

The complexity of hx Renew requires a highly technical, true engineering mindset, which produces a deeply creative, innovative environment where we push technological boundaries through our work and our regular (and sometimes irregular!) hackathons.

Your Mission

2024 has been a big year for hyperexponential. Our profile is growing rapidly, and our customer base with it (including breaking into the US!). We have many exciting features to develop, and we want to deliver more of them in parallel, sooner, and safer than we've ever done before. To ensure we're set for the future, we will be looking at all our systems, refreshing most of them and reworking the rest to get us ready for anything. It's a deeply exciting prospect for us, and your mission will be to help us deliver this!

Key Responsibilities

• Line manage a group of mixed seniority Software Engineers

• Taking care of your team:

  • Conducting regular 1:2:1s and building trust with your engineers.

  • Coaching and mentoring.

  • Fostering personal development, including training and efficient usage of Learning & Development budgets.

  • Performance management and regular feedback sessions.

• Participate in architecture and solution reviews as a key stakeholder for your team.

• Grow your team as both a hiring manager and an experienced engineer guiding your team members' growth opportunities.

• Drive our technical excellence with clear communication, thoughtful decisions, and impactful strategy.

• Help your team and the company evolve our ways of working as we grow into new scales of operation.

• Partner with Senior and/or Staff Engineers to set up and facilitate ideation sessions and technical workshops. Support product managers in converting the outcomes into product features.

• Coordinate with other engineering managers across team dependencies and cooperate on Engineering-wide initiatives.

• Being a technical point of authority within the areas of the remit of the backend engineers that you manage. Provide technical oversight, guidance and advice within your team and the organisation. This is not a hands-on role, but a level of technical authority will be critical when interacting with the engineers. You should be able to substitute for any of your engineers for sales calls and triage/design sessions and workshops.

• Work with (y)our Director of Engineering to plan the technology and architectural road-map

• Grow the external visibility of the product engineering team at hx and externally via speaking engagements, conferences, blogging, etc.

• You must be able to help attract top engineering talent and grow (i.e., be the hiring manager) your team while managing team retention.

Required Experience and Skills

• People management (both the good and the difficult): usually 4-6 direct reports

  • Minimum of two years managing (performance reviews, 1:1, regular feedback, technical roadmaps, and team strategy)

  • Bonus points if you have also mentored or managed Junior Engineering Managers (or helped people onto the EM path)

• Hands-on previous experience with technologies and concepts:

  • Web services

  • Database technology: We currently use PostgreSQL (AWS RDS), but any SQL or NoSQL experience will be a plus.

  • APIs - structure and design best practices (including security, resilience, versioning)

  • Platform architecture and design - we use AWS, Terraform, Docker

  • We currently use Rust, Kotlin, and Python. Experience with any of them would be great, but experience using any relatively modern language is required.

• Processes such as Software Development Lifecycles, Personal Development Planning, Enterprise customer strategies

• Agile methodologies - Scrum, Kanban etc.

• Experience hiring and retaining high-quality engineering talent.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

• Experience in growing and retaining a team.

• Foresight and planning experience.

• Bonus points for project and product management experience.

Interview Process

• Initial call with our Talent team to kick things off

• Manager Interview (60 mins)

• Leadership Interview (45 mins)

• Technical Interview (90 mins)

• Meet the VP Engineering (60 mins)

• Values Interview (90 mins)

• We offer!

What We Offer:

• £5,000 for individual and group training and conference budget

• 25 days holiday plus 8 bank holiday days (33 in total)

• Company pension scheme via Penfold

• Mental health and therapy provision via ⁠Spectrum.life

• Individual wellbeing allowance via Juno

• Private healthcare insurance through AXA

• Top-spec equipment (laptop, screens, adjustable desks, etc)

• Regular remote & in-person hackathons, lunch & learns, socials and games nights

• Team breakfasts and lunches, snacks, drinks fridge, fun office @ The Ministry

• Huge opportunity for personal development and mastery as we grow together!

Please note that background checks will be conducted as part of the hiring process to ensure compliance with our governance policies. We handle all background checks sensitively and in full compliance with relevant regulations. All applicant data will be processed in accordance with data protection regulations and our privacy policy.