Founding Engineering Manager (Ebury Web Platform)

Engineering Manager - Founding Team (Ebury Web Platform)

Valencia Office - Hybrid: 4 days in the office, 1 day working from home

Build the banking experience the world's businesses deserve

Ebury is a global fintech, headquartered in London. We help businesses move money across borders — FX, payments, and lending — in 140+ currencies, sending payments to 160+ countries across 30+ regulated markets, delivered by 2,000+ experts in 40+ offices worldwide and backed by the stability of majority-owner Santander. That's a bank's reach and reliability with the pace of a product team. And we've set ourselves a deliberately hard bar: beat the best digital-first experience in our market, not merely match the incumbents.

That bar is an engineering problem — and increasingly, a leadership problem. Great systems don't ship themselves; teams ship them. As a founding Engineering Manager in our new Valencia hub, your job is to build and lead the team that solves it, directly on the platforms our clients touch every day: the web portal, the mobile apps, the APIs. This isn't back-office plumbing, and it isn't a coordinator role. Every team in this hub builds client-facing products, and your mission is unambiguous: build a team that builds the best banking-and-payments experience in the market.

We also expect you to be AI-native. Not "curious about AI" — fluent. You use AI coding tools as a genuine force multiplier in your own work, you know how to help a team adopt them well, and you know how to design AI into the product so clients get answers and outcomes instead of forms and waiting.

We're opening a new engineering hub in Valencia, and you'd be one of its founding Engineering Managers — not the manager of team #40, but one of the first people setting how this hub hires, how it builds, what "good" means here, and which product bets are worth making.

Why this role is different

You'll build the team, not inherit it. As a founding EM you'll hire your first engineers, set the interview bar, and shape the culture from an empty room. The people you bring in and the standards you set in the first six months will echo for years. If you want to walk into a fully-formed team and keep it running, this isn't your role. If you want to decide what this team is, read on.

You'll own outcomes through your team, not tickets. Your team takes a real client problem — "businesses can't see why a payment is held" — and owns it end to end: the experience, the services and APIs behind it, the data, the measurement, and the iteration after launch. Your job is to make that ownership real: give the team the context, the trust, and the room to make product calls, then hold the bar on quality and delivery. You'll have opinions about what to build and the standing to act on them.

You'll be a player-coach early, a leader always. At founding stage the team is small and you'll stay close to the code — pairing, reviewing, unblocking, and shipping the occasional change yourself to keep your judgement sharp and your credibility earned. As the team grows, your leverage shifts from your own commits to the people and systems you've built. You're comfortable with both modes and know which one the moment calls for.

You'll build platforms, not one-offs. Our third principle is blunt: never build for one client, region, or deal — generalise before committing, or decline. New currencies and payment rails are onboarded as configuration and adapters, not bespoke branches. Finish-and-tidy is part of the work — cutover, decommission, delete the dead code. You reward the engineer who retires a flag, not just the one who ships the feature, and you make that value stick in how your team works.

You'll work on the real thing. Client-facing web and mobile channels evolving in parallel; an event-driven, API-first transactional platform on AWS where services own their data and talk only through known contracts; a governed GCP/BigQuery data world. Money-movement discipline — idempotency, deterministic retries, reconciliation — is table stakes, because we're handling businesses' actual cash. You don't need to be the deepest expert in every layer, but you need the technical depth to lead the people who are.

Your work will be measured by client outcomes — and team health. Self-service completion, time-to-answer, and the reliability and latency of core journeys as the client experiences them are first-class metrics here. So are the ones that tell you whether your team is built to last: delivery predictability, engineer growth and retention, on-call sustainability, and the quality of the bar you hire against.

What you'll do in your first year

Days 1–30: learn the domain and the platform, ship a small pre-scoped change to production in your first week or two to earn credibility and feel the pipeline for yourself, meet your stakeholders in Product and Design, and start building the hiring pipeline for your first engineers.

By 90 days: own a defined product area with a small team around it, run the core rituals (1:1s, planning, retros, on-call) with intent rather than ceremony, land your first hires against a bar you've helped define, and lead a project with a short design doc from ambiguous idea to a plan the team believes in.

Across the year: grow a healthy, high-performing team; take client problems from ambiguous idea to shipped, measured, iterated product; develop your engineers with real career progression; and help set the standards, interview bar, and culture for a hub that's growing around you.

What you're responsible for

• Build and grow the team. Own hiring for your team end to end — sourcing, interviewing, closing, onboarding — and set an interview bar you'd stake the hub's reputation on. Develop your engineers through honest feedback, clear growth paths, and real coaching, and address performance directly and fairly when you need to.
• Own delivery. Be accountable for your team shipping the right things, reliably and at a sustainable pace. Turn ambiguous business outcomes into a roadmap, sequence the work, manage dependencies and risk, and keep commitments visible and honest with your stakeholders.
• Provide technical leadership. Guide the design and evolution of business-critical systems in your domain — not by owning every decision, but by raising the level at which your team makes them. Lead design reviews, drive alignment on architecture and long-term direction, and step in on the highest-leverage calls.
• Partner cross-functionally. Work closely with Product, Design, and other Engineering leaders to translate business outcomes into scalable, resilient solutions, and to influence the roadmap and its trade-offs rather than just receive it.
• Set the standards and the culture. Define and evolve engineering standards — testing strategy, CI/CD, observability, operational readiness — and make quality, security, and compliance non-negotiable and built-in. Model the collaborative, high-trust, constructive-challenge culture you want the whole hub to have.
• Own operational health. Make sure the systems your team builds are production-grade and the on-call load is humane. Identify systemic risk, technical debt, and cross-team dependencies early, and drive the initiatives that improve velocity, quality, and resilience at scale.
• Lead the responsible adoption of AI. Bring AI-assisted development into how your team works as a genuine force multiplier — treating prompts and guardrails as first-class, versioned artefacts — while keeping deep understanding, accountability, and ownership of everything the team ships.

What we look for

• A track record of leading engineers. You've managed and grown a team of software engineers — hiring, developing, giving feedback, and handling performance — and you can point to people whose careers are better for having worked with you. This often aligns with prior experience as an EM, tech lead, or team lead, but we value demonstrated impact and judgement over titles or tenure.
• Delivery through a team. Proven ability to take a team from ambiguous business goals to shipped, measured, iterated product, at a sustainable pace and a high quality bar.
• Real technical depth. A strong computer-science foundation and enough hands-on engineering credibility to lead technical people well — you've built and operated production systems at scale, you can hold your own in a design review, and your engineers trust your judgement. Founding-stage EMs here stay close to the code.
• Strong hiring instincts. You know how to define a bar, run a fair and rigorous process, sell a mission, and close strong candidates — and you're excited to do it from a standing start.
• Exceptional communication and influence. You can articulate complex technical ideas clearly, build alignment across teams, and constructively challenge assumptions at every level — up, down, and sideways.
• AI-native leadership. AI coding tools are already part of how you work, and you have a view on how a team adopts them well; bonus if you've shipped AI features into a product and have an opinion on where they help the user and where they don't.
• Product and quality instincts. You ask why a feature exists before how, you reason about trade-offs holistically (client value and business context, not just the code), you're pragmatic about scope, and you care about correctness and reliability because you've handled money-adjacent systems — or you're the kind of leader who would.
• Working English — our engineering language.

Nice to have: fintech / payments / regulated-domain experience; experience being early at a new office or founding team; exposure to both web and mobile.

We hire on a clear bar and a fast, respectful process — if it's not a definite yes, it's a no, and we tell you quickly either way.

What we offer

• Highly competitive compensation, including a strong base salary, performance-based bonus, and a comprehensive benefits package, aligned to the impact and scope of a founding leadership role.
• A clearly defined leadership and technical career path, with transparent expectations, senior mentorship, and growth vectors across people leadership, technical direction, and organisational influence.
• The chance to solve complex, high-leverage problems at scale, where your decisions shape core platforms, customer outcomes, the team, and long-term business performance.
• A genuine founding role in a new hub — real ownership, visible impact, and a hand in shaping how the site works. This window doesn't come round twice.
• Meaningful ownership from day one, with the autonomy to shape your team, your standards, and your product area.
• A high-end MacBook Pro or equivalent Linux device — we want you to have the best equipment.
• A high-performing, inclusive engineering culture within a fast-growing, global fintech, where technical excellence, thoughtful decision-making, and constructive challenge are valued and rewarded.

How the interview works

Four stages, run fast and structured — usually final interview within a week, decision within 48 hours:

1. Intro chat (~30 min) — you, us, the role.
2. Initial Hiring Manager Interview (~30 min) — talk through your experience with the hiring manager and learn more about the role.
3. Technical & systems design (~60 min) — work through a real problem with our engineers to collaboratively design a solution, so we can see how you reason technically and how you'd lead a design conversation.
4. Hiring Manager & Product Leader (~60 min) — how you think about solving problems for clients, what you've delivered and led, and how we can help accelerate your career.

Ready to build?

If you want to build the team that sets the bar for a new engineering hub — shipping money software transparent enough that clients never need to ask a human what the system already knows — we'd love to talk.

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