Engineering Manager

About the role

When someone dies, their family inherits a mountain of admin. A will is the single most useful thing that makes it smaller, but only if it's correct, current and actually says what the person meant. Clearing that bar every time is a team sport, and you'll be the one making the team work.

This is a new role. You'll line-manage the engineers across the team, own their growth and hiring, and own the delivery system: how work gets from an idea to production and what slows it down on the way. There's no playbook to inherit. You'll write it, change it when the data says so, and have the authority to make it stick.

It isn't a hands-on role. You won't write code or own architecture; the team leads and the Head of Technology do that. Your job is to make sure those decisions happen well, and that the people making them are supported, stretched and shipping.

The team

Engineering is small but mighty, and growing. Engineers work in product teams, each with a lead who owns technical direction. We're planning to grow significantly over the next year, so a lot of the people you manage will be people you hired. You'll partner with the leads and with Product so every engineer has one clear picture of what matters and why.

We work in small, stable teams that own a product area end to end, from the first conversation with legal to the alert that fires if it breaks. Nobody hands you a ticket and walks away. Teams decide how to solve the problems in front of them, and often which problems are worth solving at all. Decisions are written down, reviewed kindly and revisited when we learn something new.

We're AI-native. Frontier models, best-in-class agentic tooling, and nobody counts tokens. That pushes the job away from boilerplate and towards the parts that need a person: architecture, judgement, and getting the detail right. Families come to us for a will or for probate, not for software, so we're not racing the models. Every time they improve, so does the service families get. We ship to production 20+ times a day across 7+ services. That changes what a good delivery system looks like, and working that out is half the fun of this job.

What you'll do

Most weeks split between people and plumbing. Some of the work you'll pick up:

• Run 1:1s, set clear goals and give feedback that's honest and early. Own progression and performance for every engineer you manage.
• Own hiring with the team leads: the loop, the scorecards, and onboarding good enough that new joiners ship in week one.
• Treat delivery as a system. Find the bottleneck with flow data (cycle time, WIP, throughput), fix it, measure again.
• Delete process that isn't earning its keep, and add it only when the team actually feels its absence.
• Keep legal, operations and our advisor teams informed in plain English, so engineers spend their time building rather than in status meetings.

Your first 90 days

• Week one: a 1:1 with every engineer and lead. Map how work actually flows today, not how the wiki says it does.
• Agree your priorities with the Head of Technology and publish them to the team.
• Every engineer has a development plan they wrote with you.
• Ship one measurable improvement to how we deliver, with the before and after to prove it.

What we're looking for

We care more about how you approach problems than a list of keywords. That said, here's what tends to make someone successful in this role.

You'll need

• Experience line-managing software engineers, including progression and the difficult conversations.
• A track record running agile delivery in product teams, whether your title was Engineering Manager, Delivery Lead or Agile Coach.
• Fluency in lean and flow-based ways of working. You reach for data before opinion.
• Enough understanding of how software gets built to earn engineers' trust without being the technical expert.

Nice to have

• Experience in a regulated domain: legal, financial or health.
• You've hired engineers into a team that was growing fast, and kept the culture intact.
• You've bent a tool like Linear to fit a team, rather than the other way round.

Don't tick every box? Apply anyway. We hire for how you think, not a checklist.

What you'll work with

• Planning: Linear
• Comms: Slack
• Docs: Google Workspace
• Signals: cycle time, throughput, WIP. Measured, not guessed.
• Cadence: 20+ production deploys a day
• Team: small, mighty, growing

The honest bits

Every role has them. Better you hear it from us.

• This isn't hands-on. You won't write code or review PRs. If you want to stay technical as a manager, this probably isn't your role.
• We're hiring a lot over the next year. You'll be building the loop while running it, and learning the place while new people arrive.
• Regulated, sensitive data. Some changes need a second pair of eyes from legal, and that's on purpose.
• We ship often, but "move fast and break things" isn't an option when the thing is someone's will.

You'll probably enjoy this if

• You get a kick out of watching someone you hired lead something you never could have.
• You'd rather remove a meeting than run a better one.
• You can talk about death plainly. Our users are planning for it or living through it.

What we offer

Listed, not teased. If something matters to you and isn't here, ask in your first call.

• Holiday: 27 days + bank holidays + your birthday
• Pension: 3% contribution
• Working pattern: Hybrid. In the office Tuesday to Thursday at Monument, London
• Contract: Permanent
• Learning: Time carved out for it, plus budget agreed case by case
• A will, on us: Free will for you, and a discount for friends and family
• Tools: Whatever makes you fastest. Frontier models, agentic tooling, no token budget.
• Ownership: Real decisions from week one. You'll be trusted with the call and backed when it's hard.

How we'll get to know each other

Four stages, about two weeks end to end. You'll hear back within two working days of each one, whatever the outcome.

1. Intro call · 30 min · video

A relaxed conversation with the hiring manager about what you've worked on and what you're looking for. Ask us anything.

You'll meet the hiring manager · nothing to prepare

2. Meet our People team · 30 min · video

A conversation about how you like to work, what you need from a team to do your best work, and the practical stuff: start dates, adjustments, anything you're unsure about.

You'll meet our People team · nothing to prepare

3. Delivery and people session · ~2 hours · on site

Two parts. First, work through a real situation from our world with the Head of Technology: a team that's stuck, a commitment that slipped, a hire who isn't landing. Then talk us through how you've grown engineers, handled underperformance and earned the trust of a team that didn't choose you. No trick answers, and we're as interested in what didn't work.

You'll meet the Head of Technology and the team · nothing to prepare

4. Final conversation · 45 min · video

Meet our founder. Talk about where Octopus Legacy is going, where you'd fit in it, and anything you still want to know. It runs both ways.

You'll meet our founder · bring your questions

Decision within two working days

A clear yes or no, with written feedback either way. If it's a yes, we'll talk through the offer on a call. No exploding deadlines.

About Octopus Legacy

Octopus Legacy is the place to plan for death and find support after loss. We were founded after our founder's mum died suddenly, and we're a group of people who work in death because we've been affected by it. We help people write a will, set up a trust or a Lasting Power of Attorney, and protect the people they love. When someone dies, we help their family with probate and the practical, personal and emotional challenges that come after. We're part of Octopus Group, alongside Octopus Energy and Octopus Investments.

Octopus Legacy is committed to creating an inclusive environment and is proud to be an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone. If you need any adjustments at any stage, tell us and we'll make them, no explanation needed.