As the Engineering Manager, you will take on a player-coach role, responsible for building and leading a team of 5–6 engineers. You will oversee development, ensure product stability, and foster a strong engineering culture in Manila. This role involves close collaboration with the UK-based VP of Engineering, Agile Delivery Manager, Product, and Design teams.
Duties and Responsibilities:
Team Leadership & Development
- Recruit, hire, and onboard 5-6 engineers (2 QA, 3-4 Full-Stack) within your first 3 months
- Conduct face-to-face interviews in Manila, partnering with our VPE and Head of Talent remotely
- Hold regular 1-1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations
- Foster technical excellence and continuous learning within your team
Hands-On Technical Contribution
- Spend 30-40% of your time coding alongside your team once the team is established
- Conduct thorough code reviews ensuring adherence to the company’s standards
- Provide PHP/Laravel expertise for mentoring and problem-solving
- Make technical decisions for bug fixes and customer enhancements
- Use monitoring tools (Sentry, Datadog) to proactively identify and resolve issues
Delivery & Collaboration
- Own the RUN workstream (80% bug fixes, 20% customer enhancements)
- Partner with our Agile Delivery Manager to define your team's delivery process
- Ensure P0/P1/P2 bugs are resolved within SLAs
- Participate in daily standups with VPE and ADM
- Maintain 9am-12pm UK time-availability for critical collaboration
Knowledge Transfer & Quality
- Lead knowledge absorption from UK team during ramp-up period
- Ensure your team documents learnings and creates runbooks
- Use our monitoring and alerting using Sentry and Datadog
- Partner with our Senior Customer Support Engineer on bug investigations
Requirements
Must-have Skills / Qualification:
- Proven track record as a player-coach in similar sized teams
- Strong hands-on PHP/Laravel expertise that's current and deep
- Experience building and scaling offshore/remote teams
- Background in maintaining systems whilst ensuring stability
Technical Excellence
- Expert-level PHP/Laravel knowledge for code reviews and mentoring
- Strong understanding of MySQL, Redis, and caching strategies
- Experience with AWS services (RDS, EKS preferred)
- Proficiency with monitoring tools (Sentry, Datadog)
- Understanding of CI/CD practices and deployment pipelines
Leadership & Communication
- Demonstrated ability to recruit and build teams from scratch
- Experience managing mid to senior-level engineers
- Excellent English communication (written and verbal)
- Strong async communication skills for distributed team collaboration
- Cultural sensitivity and ability to bridge working styles
- Ability to balance hands-on coding with management responsibilities
Advantageous Experience/Skills:
- Experience in B2B SaaS or cybersecurity domains
- Familiarity with enterprise integrations (SCIM, SAML, OAuth)
- Understanding of GDPR and data protection requirements
- Knowledge of agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban)
- Understanding of frontend technologies and frameworks.
