Senior Engineering Manager

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager based in Portugal.

This role leads engineering teams responsible for building AI-powered data connectivity solutions in a highly technical and collaborative environment.

You will combine people leadership, technical judgment, and operational discipline to help teams deliver high-quality software efficiently.

The position owns execution across multiple teams while shaping priorities, technical direction, team structures, and delivery practices.

You will help establish a shift-left engineering model where engineers contribute earlier to discovery, solution design, and problem definition.

AI will be embedded both in the products being built and in development workflows to accelerate exploration, planning, and implementation without compromising quality.

You will also develop senior engineers and emerging leaders, strengthen accountability and autonomy, and drive continuous improvement across engineering.

Success in this role requires balancing organizational leadership with enough technical engagement to guide complex decisions and support reliable, scalable systems.

Accountabilities:

• Lead and develop engineering teams through regular coaching, feedback, performance management, career development, and clear expectations while fostering accountability, autonomy, innovation, and continuous learning.
• Develop senior engineers, technical owners, and emerging leaders by increasing leadership capacity and empowering them to own initiatives from discovery through implementation.
• Support hiring, onboarding, retention, and talent development while identifying capability gaps and partnering with engineering leadership on organizational and workforce planning.
• Own execution and delivery across assigned teams or a broader engineering area, ensuring priorities, ownership, dependencies, risks, and commitments are clearly understood and actively managed.
• Improve engineering operating practices, team rhythms, planning processes, backlog readiness, delivery tracking, and blocker resolution while avoiding unnecessary process overhead.
• Identify and resolve cross-team dependencies and systemic delivery issues, working with Engineering and Product leadership when challenges extend beyond individual teams.
• Use streamlined workflows, automated reporting, and meaningful engineering and delivery metrics to identify trends, improve execution, and inform decision-making.
• Communicate progress, risks, challenges, resource requirements, and delivery outcomes clearly and proactively to leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Provide strong technical leadership and judgment across teams, ensuring engineering decisions align with architecture, quality, reliability, and broader technical strategy.
• Partner with senior and principal engineers to evaluate technical approaches, challenge assumptions, and ensure appropriate ownership of architecture and technical decisions.
• Maintain sufficient hands-on technical engagement to remain credible and provide informed guidance on complex engineering decisions.
• Identify recurring technical challenges and drive improvements across engineering practices, architecture, tooling, and ways of working.
• Ensure effective operational ownership, including sustainable on-call practices, appropriate staffing, and clear accountability for production systems.
• Establish and monitor SLOs, error budgets, and other reliability measures, taking corrective action when reliability trends deteriorate.
• Provide leadership during major incidents through effective coordination, decision-making, escalation, and stakeholder communication, followed by meaningful postmortems and tracked corrective actions.
• Partner with Product and cross-functional stakeholders to establish clear problem statements, business context, priorities, and success criteria while preserving engineering ownership of solution design.
• Champion effective AI-assisted development practices across solution exploration, technical planning, ticket creation, development, and other workflows while maintaining engineering quality and accountability.
• Enable engineers to participate earlier in discovery, clarify requirements, contribute to solution design, and translate business needs into well-defined technical work.
• Identify opportunities to use AI, automation, and improved engineering practices to increase developer productivity and organizational effectiveness.

Requirements:

• Bring 8+ years of software engineering experience, including hands-on experience in enterprise or SaaS environments with a strong focus on technical competency and innovation.
• Have 4+ years of engineering management and/or people management experience with a demonstrated record of leading, coaching, and developing engineering teams.
• Have experience leading multiple engineering teams or initiatives involving multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Demonstrate strong ownership of execution and delivery, including planning, prioritization, dependency management, risk identification, and continuous improvement of development workflows.
• Have experience partnering with senior Engineering and Product leadership on organizational priorities, resource requirements, technical tradeoffs, and execution strategy.
• Bring experience owning production services, including on-call operations, SLOs, incident response, and postmortems.
• Be experienced in collaborative Product and Engineering environments where engineers actively participate in discovery, requirements definition, technical solutioning, and delivery.
• Demonstrate strong technical judgment and the ability to guide design decisions, challenge assumptions, and empower senior and lead engineers to own technical initiatives.
• Possess strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to create clarity across Engineering, Product, and other cross-functional teams.
• Have experience with cloud platform management and architecture, preferably Azure, supporting scalable, high-performance systems and cloud-native deployments.
• Bring strong Java/Kotlin development experience and the ability to provide technical guidance across backend services and microservices.
• Have experience leveraging or leading teams that use AI-assisted software development tools and workflows.
• Recent hands-on coding experience is preferred.
• Kubernetes experience and familiarity with container orchestration and deployment are considered a plus.
• React framework experience is a plus.
• Experience designing and implementing microservice architectures for distributed systems and reliable platforms is a plus.
• Hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or have equivalent practical experience.

Benefits:

• Annual compensation of $220,000 USD.
• Full-time position with a remote work arrangement.
• Opportunity to lead engineering teams building AI-powered data connectivity solutions.
• Significant scope to influence technical direction, engineering practices, organizational structure, and delivery strategy.
• Opportunity to develop senior engineers and emerging technical leaders while contributing to broader engineering effectiveness.
• Exposure to AI-assisted software development and modern cloud-native engineering practices.