Engineering Manager

The Engineering Manager is a people, delivery, and technical leadership role responsible for engineering effectiveness, capability, and the way software gets built across multiple teams within Flooid. You will line-manage Engineering Leads and, through them, own the health and performance of their teams. This is a manager-of-managers role, not a single-team manager role.

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will support the rules and standards we must operate by, while working with the VP to implement and evolve them as the organisation and technology change. We need someone who remains excited by engineering and agentic AI.

Flooid builds the point-of-sale and unified commerce software that some of the world's largest retailers run their stores on. When our software is late, slow, or wrong, real tills stop working. Agentic AI is already part of our engineering day, not a pilot but the direction we are committing to, and this role is critical in making it work at scale with the delivery discipline our customers depend on: high quality, getting faster over time, and hitting the dates we have committed.

Responsibilities:

• Line manage, coach, and develop Engineering Leads across multiple teams, creating clear expectations, strong leadership capability, and succession plans.
• Own performance management and career development across your group: support and guide the teams, help people grow, intervene where they struggle and put clear performance improvement plans in place where needed.
• Own delivery confidence across your teams, so work ships at high quality, with increasing speed, and to the times we have committed, driving cross-team planning, dependencies, and risk to improve forecasting and reduce escalation.
• Partner closely with the Product, Architecture, and Professional Services on scope, sequencing, and trade-offs. The Delivery Lead owns the programme and customer plan; you own whether engineering can actually deliver it.
• Work with the VP and other lead stakeholders on the agentic delivery lifecycle end to end, from specification through implementation, review, testing, and release, deciding where agents lead, where humans lead, and where a human signature is non-negotiable.
• Be part of implementing that strategy: work hands-on in Cursor and Flow Next, and in the operating model alongside individual contributors and your Engineering Leads.
• Make prompts, skills, and context first-class engineering artefacts that are versioned and reusable, and build evaluation into our quality system the way automated testing already is. Work with Platform Engineering, Architecture, Cloud, and Security on the platform underneath: model access, observability, audit trails, and cost.
• Responsibility for delivering agreed metrics and KPIs that make our improvements visible to the business, and use them actively to manage how we work: quality, flow, predictability, team health, and whether AI is genuinely helping.
• Establish what good looks like in engineering process, Agile ways of working, and technical quality, and support our teams to grow career paths that make sense in an AI-assisted world.

What success looks like in your first year:

• Our Engineering Leads are supported and developed.

• Teams are delivering at high quality, getting faster, and hitting committed dates, with fewer avoidable escalations.

Requirements

Our technology stack includes:

• Java (JUnit, Mockito, Selenium)
• JavaScript
• Spring core/web/remoting/boot
• Angular
• Mobile Development (Flutter, Dart, iOS & Android)
• SQL / MongoDB
• GCP
• Cursor (fluency required)

Essential

• Proven experience line-managing Engineering Leads, team leads, or equivalent leaders across multiple teams, rather than a first-time people leader of a single team.

• Strong people leadership skills, with experience line managing leaders, coaching for performance, and supporting career progression across multiple teams.
• Deep technical understanding and credibility, with the ability to review, challenge, and support engineering decisions, architecture discussions, delivery trade-offs, and technical problem solving. You remain excited by engineering and agentic AI and want to be part of implementing the strategy.
• Fluency in Cursor, used as a normal part of how you lead rather than as an occasional demo, so you can review AI-assisted work with judgement and set the standard from first-hand use.
• Practical experience of AI-assisted or agentic engineering in a working team, where you changed how software actually gets built. We care about the operating model you put in place, the quality gates you set, and what measurably changed.
• Strong track record of delivering at high quality, improving speed over time, and hitting committed dates in complex product or customer-facing environments, with a clear view of modern Agile and DevOps practice.
• Excellent stakeholder management.

Desirable

• Experience supporting a shift from bespoke delivery models to configurable, scalable products and platform-based ways of working.
• Experience of spec-driven or script-driven development, and of agentic engineering frameworks such as Flow Next (flow-next.dev), used to define work clearly before agents implement it.
• Experience driving engineering transformation or delivery maturity initiatives.
• Comfortable balancing customer commitments, operational stability, technical quality, and time-to-market pressures across several teams.

A successful candidate will be a calm, credible, and confident manager. They will be highly effective at building trust with Engineering Leads, challenging constructively, and creating alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders. They will bring a pragmatic approach to continuous improvement.

Having great skills and experience is important to us but we also want the right person to be part of the Flooid leadership team. You’ll be a strong all-round leader who brings:

• Technical leadership with the credibility to support, challenge, and guide engineering decisions across teams

• A forward-thinking approach to technology, with the ability to embed AI-enabled engineering practices that create measurable value for teams, customers, and the business.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capability, using data and insight to identify issues, improve flow, and raise standards

• Clear, influential communication with the ability to align stakeholders around priorities, trade-offs, timelines, and outcomes

• A results-driven mindset, taking ownership for predictable delivery and enabling teams to meet commitments

• Collaborative leadership that fosters accountability, and encourages continuous improvement across teams

• Strong business awareness, aligning engineering decisions with customer outcomes, organisational priorities, and long-term platform health

Benefits

At Flooid you will find a fun, professional and supportive environment where people genuinely care about the work they do and the customers they serve.

We value contribution over job titles, encourage openness and collaboration, move quickly, and believe in rolling up our sleeves to get great things done.

At Flooid you will be making a mature, high-stakes retail platform and an established engineering organisation meaningfully faster with agentic engineering. You will have the backing of the VP of Engineering and the CTO, senior individual contributors by your side, and the autonomy to shape the operating model rather than inherit one.

Salary: Up to $180,000 dependant on experience

Location: United States - Hybrid (primary office located in Cincinnati, Ohio). You will be expected to work from our Cincinnati office as required. You must be in an EST timezone. International travel, especially to the UK, will be required on occasion.

Hours: Full-Time - At Flooid, we promote a flexible work environment that allows you to balance your work responsibilities with other priorities, like picking up your children, caring for an aging parent, or attending important family events.

Benefits: Benefits start on day one - medical, dental, vision, life, and disability coverage available; competitive salary; flexible PTO policy that allows for uncapped PTO; fully paid FMLA leave comparable to company-paid short-term disability coverage; 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave; 401(k) plan with company match

Applications: If you believe you have the skills and experience to succeed in this role, even if you do not meet 100% of the criteria, we encourage you to apply. Research suggests that certain groups will apply for a role if they meet 60% of the position’s requirements, while others will only apply if they hit 100%. We encourage applications from anyone with the skills, experience, and key attributes that will make you a great fit for the role and addition to the company.

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Please ensure that your application remains a personal reflection of you. Every resume is looked at by a real person.

Reasonable Accommodations: Work is performed in an office setting or remote working setting with frequent interruptions. This position requires the ability to sit or stand at a workstation for extended periods of time. The ability to communicate effectively in person, by phone, and on electronic devices is necessary to perform this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Equal Employment Opportunity Employer: Flooid is an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Employer and complies with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and all other applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations pertaining to EEO as well as subsequent guidelines established by the EEO Commission.

We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive a high volume of applications.