Senior Engineering Manager

Who You Are

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you are responsible for the delivery, quality, and growth of two engineering teams (~8–10 engineers) within Surfe’s product engineering organization. You will own the end-to-end execution of your teams: standup's, sprint planning,grooming, capacity management, quality standards, and people development. You work cross-functionally with Product Managers (who own the “what and why”) and are accountable for the “how” how work is scoped, built, tested, and shipped.

You’ll transform delivery execution from reactive to predictable, implementing sustainable capacity planning, quality gates, and engineering processes that produce consistent results. You are accountable for sprint completion rates, engineering quality metrics, team health, and the professional growth of every engineer on your teams. You’ll also bring deep technical credibility you’ve built systems before and can review RFCs, challenge architecture decisions, and earn the respect of senior ICs.

What You’ll Do

• One Engineering Team: Full people management for 8-10 engineers across. You’ll own their delivery, growth, and performance.

• Sprint Execution: Drive sustainable capacity planning (70% product features, 20% engineering work, 10% buffer). Transform our completion rate from 50% to 85%+ through better scoping, prioritization, ceremonies and accountability.

• Process Architecture: Implement and refine Definition of Ready / Definition of Done, sprint ceremonies, backlog refinement, and retrospectives that actually drive improvement.

• People Development: Career conversations, performance management, promotion packages, and coaching that makes engineers measurably better every quarter. Use our career rubric (P1-P7, M1-M4) to set clear expectations.

• OKR Delivery: Own the successful delivery of multiple team OKRs and product roadmaps. Cascade company objectives into actionable team-level key results.

• Cross-functional Partnership: Work daily with Product Managers (they own the “what and why”, you own the “how”). Joint accountability for sprint success with shared metrics.

• Hiring/Retaining: Build your teams. Source, interview, and close senior engineers who are curious, autonomous, and thrive in ambiguity.

Specifically, we’re looking for

Management & Delivery

• 10+ years in software engineering with at least 5-8 years managing engineering teams directly (not tech lead with dotted-line reports).

• Managed 10+ engineers, with dedicated Product Managers.

• Scaled through chaos: You’ve taken a team from ad-hoc execution to predictable delivery. You can point to the specific processes, metrics, and cultural changes you drove.

• Sprint mechanics mastery: You’ve run capacity-based planning, velocity tracking, and sprint health metrics. You know when to protect the sprint and when to flex.

• Performance management: You’ve had hard conversations, put engineers on PIPs when needed, and coached underperformers into top contributors. You don’t avoid conflict.

• Stakeholder communication: You present status, risks, and trade-offs to leadership clearly. No surprises.

Technical & Architecture

You won’t write code daily, but you’ve built systems before and your engineers can’t bluff you. You can review a PR, challenge an RFC, and spot when a proposed architecture won’t scale.

• Frontend Architecture: You understand modern frontend patterns: component architecture, state management, rendering performance, sdk's, observability, RUM, Feature flag and the challenges of building across multiple surfaces (web apps, browser extensions).

• Service-Oriented Architecture: You understand how to decompose monoliths, define service boundaries, design API contracts, and manage inter-service communication patterns. You’ve lived through the trade-offs.

• Domain-Driven Design: You think in bounded contexts, aggregates, and domain events. You can challenge your teams on whether their service boundaries reflect real business domains or just convenient code splits.

• API Design: REST, event-driven, webhooks you’ve designed and reviewed APIs at scale. You have opinions on versioning, pagination, error handling, and contract testing.

• Backend Systems: You’ve built or led teams building high-throughput backend services. You understand database design, caching strategies, message queues, and the operational realities of running services in production.

• Infrastructure/Devops Awareness: You’re comfortable discussing containerization, CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure (AWS), and deployment strategies. You don’t need to write Terraform, but you can review infrastructure decisions.

Quality & Engineering Excellence

You believe quality is a system, not a wish. You’ve built the processes and culture that make quality the default, not the exception.

• Testing Culture: You’ve implemented testing standards (coverage targets, unit/integration/E2E requirements), enforced them through CI/CD gates, and shifted teams from “testing is QA’s job” to “testing is how we ship.”

• Observability & Monitoring: You’ve driven observability practices: structured logging, metrics dashboards, alerting, and SLOs. You’ve used tools like DataDog, Grafana, or similar to make production health visible and actionable.

• Definition of Done: You’ve built and enforced quality gates that teams actually follow not checkbox theater, but meaningful criteria that prevent regressions, improve code review quality, and ensure features are truly production-ready.

• High-Performing Teams: You’ve built teams where engineering excellence is a cultural value, not a top-down mandate. Your teams write RFCs before building, review each other’s code rigorously, and take pride in operational reliability.

• Continuous Improvement: You run retrospectives that produce real change. You track quality metrics (bug escape rate, incident frequency, deployment success rate) and use them to drive systematic improvement.

Nice-to-have

• Hands-on experience with Go - you’ve built or shipped production systems in Golang

• Hands-on experience with React and TypeScript you can review frontend architecture decisions with depth

• Chrome Extension development experience or understanding of browser extension constraints

• AWS production experience (Kubernetes, ECS, RDS, SQS/SNS, CloudWatch, Terraform)

• Experience with Elasticsearch, Redis, or vector databases at scale

• Background with SOC2 / ISO 27001 compliance from an engineering perspective

• Experience managing remote-first, async-first engineering teams across EU/US timezones

• B2B SaaS, API platforms, or sales intelligence product experience

You’ll Thrive Here If

• You’ve transformed an engineering organization’s delivery culture AND raised its technical bar simultaneously

• You build coalitions rather than issuing mandates - you understand that lasting process change requires buy-in, not authority

• You obsess over team health metrics: sprint completion, cycle time, developer satisfaction, regrettable attrition

• You see the Engineering Manager role as a craft, not a stepping stone you read about management, practice it deliberately, and measure your own improvement

• You’re as comfortable debating service boundaries with a Staff Engineer as you are coaching a junior dev through a career conversation

• You find energy in ambiguity. Our processes are being built right now. You’ll shape them, not follow a playbook.

What we offer

• Competitive salary

• Equity package

• Challenging and interesting work

• A healthy work environment (no interruptions, few meetings, "low touch" management)

• A place in a diverse and open-minded team (60+ people from 20+ countries)

• Fully remote within EU / US East timezones

• Stipend to set up your home office

• Annual team events in Paris and offsitesHealth insurance and other benefits applicable to your place of residence, if contract of employment in France or elsewhere via Deel Employer of record

• Possibility to work as a freelancer