Senior Engineering Manager - 9-10 month FTC

Senior Engineering Manager - Maternity Cover | Manchester or London - Hybrid (1-2 days per week) | Competitive Salary + Benefits

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to join Moonpig on a fixed-term maternity cover contract of around 9-10 months, with availability to start in November 2026.

You’ll provide people and technical leadership across teams within our Top of Funnel area, helping millions of customers navigate, discover and explore Moonpig’s product catalogue. It’s a role for someone who enjoys building strong engineering teams while staying connected to the technology, product direction and decisions that shape what we build.

People leadership will be a big part of your role. You’ll coach and support engineers, foster an inclusive and collaborative environment, and help people grow their skills, confidence and ownership. Alongside this, you’ll partner closely with Product, Design and Engineering Leads to shape roadmaps, explore opportunities and make thoughtful decisions about our technical direction.

You’ll stay close enough to the technology to contribute meaningfully to conversations around architecture, engineering quality and delivery, while empowering engineers to make decisions at the right level.

Our expectations of our Engineering Managers:

• Building culture: “Culture eats process for breakfast” and we wholeheartedly believe this. As an Engineering Manager you are responsible for fostering a growth culture and contributing to our management best practices. You help us become an exceptional place to work for the ambitious, highly motivated people we hire. Your team of engineers are responsible for various services and you advocate the mantra “You build it, you run it”. At the end of the day, you have a massive influence on our overall engineering quality and culture and you actively work to continuously improve this.
• People progression: As an Engineering Manager you are also expected to focus on the progression of people. Fifty percent of your time will be focussed on coaching, 121’s, mentoring and driving a high performance engineering culture. You need to be empathetic towards an individual’s needs and ensure we support and grow our engineers. You’ll identify which skill sets are required for the successful delivery of projects, coaching or recruiting engineers to cover any skill shortages.
• Driving good Engineering: As an Engineering Manager you’ll lead by example, demonstrating best practices, working with your engineers through regular pairing sessions or providing technical leadership to help deliver new features, ensuring that the design and development of our systems adhere to good engineering principles.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and support engineers through regular 1:1s, coaching, timely feedback, career development and performance conversations.
• Foster an inclusive, collaborative and learning-focused engineering culture where people feel comfortable sharing ideas, challenging decisions and learning from each other.
• Partner with Product and Design to shape roadmaps and product direction, bringing an engineering perspective to discovery, prioritisation and trade-offs.
• Help engineers get involved early in discovery and problem shaping rather than Engineering operating solely as a downstream delivery function.
• Stay close to system design, architecture and technical direction, helping teams make high-quality decisions without becoming the default decision-maker.
• Encourage pragmatic technical choices that favour simplicity and make effective use of existing software and shared capabilities.
• Support Engineering Leads and teams with planning, estimation, sequencing, dependencies, risks and transparent communication around delivery.
• Balance customer and business outcomes with appropriate investment in reliability, maintainability and longer-term engineering quality.
• Champion strong engineering practices, including test-driven development and automated testing, helping teams build quality into the development process.
• Support strong operational ownership through CI/CD, observability, production support and the principle that teams own the systems they build and run.
• Help teams identify and address technical debt sustainably while maintaining appropriate technical and operational documentation.
• Build technical leadership throughout the teams, using the experience and strengths of engineers at different levels rather than concentrating technical authority in one role.
• Collaborate across Product, Design, Data/Data Science, CRM, Commercial and specialist functions where relevant, creating clarity around priorities, risks, dependencies and trade-offs.
• Support team capability planning, identifying opportunities to develop skills and strengthen engineering capability

About You:

• Experience leading software engineering teams as an Engineering Manager, Senior Engineering Manager or in a comparable people-leadership role.
• Strong people leadership experience, including coaching, career development, feedback and performance management.
• Engineering expertise with enough technical depth to contribute credibly to full-stack and cloud system design, architecture, engineering quality and operational conversations.
• A collaborative leadership style that enables engineers and Engineering Leads to own decisions rather than relying on the manager for every answer.
• Experience building strong Product and Engineering partnerships and involving engineers in discovery, problem shaping and roadmap decisions.
• Experience sharing accountability for customer or business outcomes and translating these into clear engineering priorities.
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, including automated testing and TDD principles, CI/CD, observability and production ownership.
• Experience facilitating technical decisions, bringing the right people and evidence together and constructively challenging thinking when needed.
• Comfortable balancing feature delivery and experimentation with reliability, technical quality and sustainable engineering investment.
• Ability to collaborate and influence across disciplines while communicating technical decisions, risks and trade-offs clearly.
• Commitment to creating an inclusive environment where engineers can grow, challenge ideas, give and receive feedback and take meaningful ownership.
• Available to start inNovember 2026 for the fixed-term maternity cover period.

Our Tech Environment:

Our Top of Funnel teams work across full-stack customer experiences and highly scalable cloud and distributed systems. The environment includes:

• C# / .NET and Node.js / TypeScript across modern backend and full-stack development.
• React and GraphQL within our web and API ecosystem.
• AWS, including cloud and serverless architecture.
• OpenSearch, alongside integrations with our content management, search and recommendations capabilities.
• Terraform for infrastructure as code.
• GitHub/GitLab and CI/CD practices supporting frequent, reliable delivery.
• Grafana and AWS CloudWatch for monitoring and observability.
• Automated testing and engineering practices focused on building quality into the development lifecycle.
• Production health, incident management and strong operational ownership.
• Experimentation and data-informed product development, including A/B testing and hypothesis-led approaches.
• Sustainable technical debt management and technical documentation, including architecture and operational guidance.