Product Engineer Manager

The Role

As a Product Engineer Manager , you will own the technical delivery of a product area end-to-end at GetVocal, working closely with Product to turn customer and business problems into reliable software that reaches production quickly.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role.

You will own more than the implementation of individual features. You will help shape the roadmap, define the technical approach, write production code, coordinate delivery, manage releases, and remain accountable for the reliability and maintainability of what your team ships.

We are looking for the kind of engineer who can move comfortably between product thinking, architecture, coding, delivery and technical leadership.

Modern software engineering is also changing rapidly. We expect our engineers to use AI coding tools as part of their everyday workflow - not simply to generate code, but to explore solutions, accelerate implementation, improve testing and debugging, and increase the amount of high-quality software they can deliver.

The result should be simple: better products shipped faster, without lowering the engineering bar.

What You’ll Do

• Own the product roadmap together with Product, contributing technical context, feasibility, sequencing and engineering trade-offs.
• Own features from problem definition to production: technical specifications, planning, resource allocation, implementation, testing, release and post-release monitoring.
• Take technical ownership of your product area, ensuring architecture, code quality, security, reliability, scalability and technical debt are managed appropriately.
• Remain highly hands-on and write meaningful amounts of production code.
• Build and evolve backend services and product capabilities, with Python as a core part of the stack.
• Break complex product requirements into clear technical plans that engineers - and AI coding agents - can execute effectively.
• Own the release lifecycle for your area, including CI/CD, release readiness, deployment and rollback strategies.
• Improve development velocity and reduce the time between an idea being agreed and that capability reaching production.
• Monitor production behaviour and continuously improve uptime, error rates, latency, incident frequency and overall product reliability.
• Lead technical investigations when things go wrong and ensure incidents translate into meaningful engineering improvements.
• Use AI coding tools to accelerate implementation, testing, debugging, refactoring, documentation and technical exploration.
• Review AI-generated and human-written code with the same level of engineering scrutiny.
• Coordinate engineers across internal and offshore teams, including helping with hiring, onboarding and technical development where required.
• Give Product and Engineering leadership clear visibility into progress, risks, trade-offs, incidents and changes to delivery commitments.
• Raise the engineering bar through pragmatic technical leadership rather than process for the sake of process.

Requirements

• Strong experience building and operating production software systems.
• Excellent software engineering fundamentals and strong hands-on Python experience.
• Experience owning significant product functionality from specification through deployment and operation.
• Strong understanding of system architecture, APIs, databases, distributed systems and production environments.
• Experience designing systems for reliability, scalability, security and maintainability.
• Strong understanding of automated testing, CI/CD and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience diagnosing production issues using logs, metrics, traces and other observability tooling.
• Ability to make sensible technical trade-offs between speed, complexity, quality and long-term maintainability.
• Strong product judgement - you understand why something is being built, not only how to build it.
• Experience leading other engineers technically without becoming disconnected from the codebase.
• Comfortable coordinating multiple engineers or distributed/offshore development teams.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to communicate technical decisions, risks and trade-offs clearly to non-engineering stakeholders.
• High ownership, pragmatism and comfort operating in a fast-moving environment.

AI-Native Engineering

You should already be using tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI or equivalent AI development tools as part of your normal engineering workflow.

We are particularly interested in engineers who know how to:

• Turn product requirements into clear, AI-executable technical tasks.
• Use AI agents to explore multiple implementation approaches quickly.
• Run multiple development or investigation workflows in parallel where appropriate.
• Review and challenge AI-generated code rather than accepting it blindly.
• Identify hallucinations, security issues, unnecessary complexity and architectural weaknesses.
• Use AI to accelerate test creation, debugging, refactoring and documentation.
• Maintain clean architecture and engineering standards even when development velocity increases.
• Take full ownership of everything that ultimately reaches production.

AI tools amplify strong engineers. They do not replace engineering judgement.

You should be capable of designing the system yourself, understanding every important technical decision, and challenging the output of the tools you use.

How Success Looks

Success in this role will be visible in three areas:

Roadmap execution - the team consistently delivers the product commitments it makes each quarter.

Product reliability - what we release performs reliably in production, with strong uptime and low error, incident and rollback rates.

Lead time to production - we continuously reduce the time required to move from an agreed product requirement to reliable production software.

What This Role Is

This is not a traditional Tech Lead role where your primary responsibility is meetings, coordination and code reviews.

It is also not a pure feature-development position where Product decides what to build and Engineering simply executes tickets.

You are expected to be a builder, technical owner and product partner.

You help decide what should be built, determine how it should be built, build important parts yourself, enable others to move faster, and remain accountable for how the product performs once customers are using it.

Benefits

What we offer

• High ownership and autonomy
• Diverse, international team across Europe
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI, voice, and enterprise deployments
• Fast-paced environment with strong learning curve
• 25 days holiday + public holidays
• Private healthcare with 50% coverage for you, and 100% coverage for your kids
• Swile
• Pension contribution
• ESOP/VSOP (shares)