Senior Engineering Manager (f/m/x) - remote

We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager (f/m/x) to lead our Platform and Data Engineering teams. These are supporting teams, their mission is to multiply the effectiveness of every product squad at refurbed by providing reliable infrastructure, shared services, clean data, and developer tooling. You will own the technical foundation that product teams build on, and ensure it is stable, scalable, and easy to work with.

Our platform technology stack includes Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Redis, and RabbitMQ on the backend, with infrastructure running on Google Cloud Platform provisioned with Terraform, and orchestrated with Kubernetes. Our data platform is built with Python on top of BigQuery.

WHO YOU ARE:

Leadership

• You are a senior, trusted engineering leader with 8+ years of experience managing engineers in platform, infrastructure, or data teams
• You have led teams where the customer is internal, you understand what it means to provide a service to other engineers and how to measure success in that context
• You have a proven ability to develop, mentor, and retain engineering talent, as well as manage performance with clarity and empathy
• You lead with low ego, openness, and a belief in autonomy and empowerment, where engineers take ownership and collaborate effectively
• You partner with product managers and engineering leaders to evolve Platform and Data Engineering as products
• You establish feedback loops and metrics to understand developer experience, delivery friction, and engineering effectiveness, using those insights to guide investments

Technical experience

• You have a strong background in cloud infrastructure, ideally GCP (GKE, Cloud Run, IAM, Cloud SQL, Cloud Logging, BigQuery), but AWS or Azure also relevant
• You have experience designing and operating Kubernetes-based environments including CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability stacks
• You understand data engineering fundamentals: pipeline design, data warehouse modeling, transformation tooling, and data quality practices
• You are comfortable reviewing infrastructure-as-code, participating in architecture reviews, and guiding trade-off discussions around reliability, cost, and performance
• You have a solid understanding of backend systems, distributed architectures, and how scalable services are designed, enabling you to actively participate in architectural discussions and guide teams toward sound decisions
• You understand SQL, relational database concepts, and modern backend development practices well enough to provide context, make informed decisions, and remove ambiguity
• While you are not expected to be hands-on day to day, you feel confident reviewing high-level designs, evaluating trade-offs, and ensuring that the team ships robust, thoughtful solutions

Collaboration

• You thrive in environments where your team's success is measured by the success of others, you view other engineering teams as your primary stakeholders
• You build trust across teams through reliability, transparency, and clear communication of your team's roadmap, incidents, and limitations
• You influence through clarity and context rather than authority, building alignment across teams and domains
• You are skilled at understanding the needs of product squads and translating them into infrastructure priorities, developer tooling improvements, or data platform investments

Engineering culture

• You cultivate a culture focused on ownership and reliability
• You promote modern engineering practices, clear and simple processes
• You foster transparency, feedback, and knowledge-sharing
• You reject blame culture and treat incidents as learning opportunities
• You are self-directed, aligned with objectives, and comfortable navigating ambiguity
• You are confident representing your teams across the whole organization and with company leadership

Additional background

• Excellent English skills and based in Europe
• Strong background in software engineering, infrastructure, or data systems, with a strong foundation for systems thinking
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider at depth (GCP preferred; AWS or Azure also relevant)
• Background in either platform/infrastructure or data engineering at depth, with meaningful exposure to the other 

WHAT YOU’LL DO:

• Manage and support engineers across the Platform and Data Engineering teams, ensuring clear mission, healthy processes, and a productive working environment that doesn't depend on individual heroics
• Conduct regular 1:1s, mentor engineers, and support their personal and professional growth
• Build psychological safety, enable ownership, and help team members unlock their potential
• Facilitate technical discussions, architecture reviews, and design decisions to ensure reliability, scalability, and maintainability
• Ensure your teams produce high-quality engineering outcomes by promoting best practices and establishing clear quality standards
• Contribute to code reviews or smaller technical tasks when needed, while keeping your focus on team impact not hands-on development
• Ensure infrastructure and data systems can support refurbed's growth ambitions
• Identify and resolve blockers, surface risks early, and maintain a productive environment where teams can move quickly with clarity
• Contribute to company, department and squad-level planning, driving both short- and long-term infrastructure and data strategies
• Participate in hiring and team growth, building a strong bench of senior engineers across both domains
• Strengthen the engineering culture through feedback, knowledge sharing, documentation, and leading by example
• Encourage experimentation, learning, and adoption of modern tools and practices, including AI-assisted engineering tools where they deliver meaningful outcomes
• Define and track success metrics for Platform and Data Engineering, including reliability, developer experience, platform adoption, operational efficiency, and engineering effectiveness (e.g. using DORA/SPACE Framework)