At Longshot Systems we build advanced platforms for sports betting analytics and trading. We're looking for an Engineering Manager to own the people and process side of our engineering organisation: over 40 engineers today, after growing more than threefold in under two years, and still growing.
This is a team lead role, not a tech lead role. Architecture, technical direction and code-level decisions sit with our CTO and tech leads. You'd be accountable for the engineers themselves (how they're hired, managed, developed and progressed) and for the processes that keep our teams working well together. The aim is to free our technical leaders to stay close to the technical work, and to make the whole organisation faster and more effective.
Every engineer at Longshot has two people looking after them: a tech lead who owns what they build and how it's built, and you, who own how they're managed, developed and assessed. Day to day that's a collaborative partnership: you spot an issue, work it through with the relevant tech lead and agree an approach together. On technical questions the tech lead's judgement prevails. On how engineers are managed, and on processes that need to be consistent across teams (review cycles, progression, hiring standards, starters and leavers), the decision is yours. You'd also run a regular forum with the CTO and tech leads covering the hiring pipeline, attrition risk, the balance between maintenance and development work, and where standards are drifting.
You'll have been an engineer yourself, with enough technical depth to hold your own with strong senior ICs, judge whether our practices are any good and be taken seriously when the conversation turns technical. Just as importantly, you'll have done this at our scale before, you've personally led an engineering organisation of 30–50+ engineers and scaled it through growth, owning the hiring, structure and people processes that made it work.
We are a hybrid working company, working Thursdays in our London (Farringdon) office and flexible the rest of the week. Our typical working hours are 10 am to 6 pm UK time, Monday to Friday, but we support flexible working and trust our team to manage their own schedules to meet their goals.
What you'd be doing
- Recruitment: own our engineering hiring process end to end, from funnel design to interview processes and how we evaluate candidates. Design role-specific interviews with the tech leads and work with our Head of Talent to make the overall funnel more efficient. Tech leads and leadership make the final call on hires; you own the system those decisions run through. Expect a substantial interviewing load.
- Line management and progression: own the twice-yearly review cycle, the progression framework and calibration across teams. Tech leads assess engineers' work; you make sure standards and outcomes are consistent, run some of the review conversations, make compensation recommendations and decide promotions jointly with the CTO. Spot where training or conferences would help people grow.
- Delivery: we handle a lot of short-notice maintenance work that has to be done on time and safely without derailing longer-term product work. You won't choose or prioritise projects, but you'll diagnose when things are moving slowly and why, flag early when the maintenance-to-development balance has slipped or agreed processes aren't being followed, and provide the metrics and reporting that help tech leads catch issues early.
- Engineering standards: bring your experience of high-performing engineering organisations to push our processes and standards forward, spot weaknesses in current practice and help us plan for how growth will change the way we work.
- Developer experience: champion investment in dev UX, including driving effective adoption of LLM-based tooling and making sure it genuinely improves the team's capability. You'll be hands-on trying new tools, processes and techniques so you can assess them properly.
- Engineering operations: own cloud spend, our SaaS estate and licensing, security processes including starters and leavers, and company-wide onboarding for technical staff. Tech leads own team-specific onboarding.
Interview process
- Intro call (30 mins) - your background + interests
- 90 min video call with the CTO
- 60 min call with founder
- Onsite interview and meet the team
Requirements
- A software engineering background, with the technical credibility to work alongside strong senior ICs.
- Proven experience as a people manager of engineers, including running review cycles, progression and calibration.
- A track record of owning engineering hiring at volume, not just participating, both before and since LLMs changed how we assess candidates.
- Proven experience leading and scaling an engineering organisation of 30–50+ engineers yourself, at a startup or scale-up of a similar size to ours. This is essential: experience gained mainly in large corporates, or with teams of under 20, is unlikely to be the right fit.
- Comfortable working without enterprise scaffolding: no dedicated HR, IT or procurement teams to lean on.
- Long experience improving processes, standards and delivery in high-performing engineering teams.
- The right approach: you measure success by how much better other people's teams work, not by ownership or credit. You know when to push back and when you might be missing the context behind why things are the way they are, and you'll listen before reaching for a framework.
- Fluent written and spoken English. This role lives or dies on communication with engineers, tech leads and leadership.
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience rolling out LLM-based developer tooling across a team and measuring its impact.
- Experience managing cloud spend, SaaS estates and licensing.
- Experience owning security processes such as starter and leaver access management.
Benefits
- Participation in the uncapped company bonus scheme
- 10% matched pension contributions
- Private healthcare insurance
- Long term illness insurance
- Gym membership
Longshot Systems London, England Office
Baker Street, London, United Kingdom
