Engineering Manager

Job Description

About the role 

As an Engineering Manager, you lead one or two teams with a specific technical mission — front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform — giving both people and technical direction, and owning what your teams ship. 

You set team-level technical direction within the wider architectural guardrails, grow strong engineers into stronger ones, and own delivery and operational outcomes — creating the conditions for your senior and staff engineers to provide technical leadership too. You operate agents yourself and lead our AI-native SDLC from the front. You report to your domain's senior engineering leader. 

What this is not  A purely process or Scrum-master role, or a hands-off manager who sets no technical direction. You lead people and technology together, and stay technically close through design, pairing, incident response, reviews, technical investigation, and agent workflows — regular individual coding output is not the measure of the role. 

The team 

You lead one or two teams with a specific mission — for example front-end feature development, middleware, back-end services, data, or platform. 

• Delivers its part of the domain's roadmap. 
• Sets and upholds the technical standards for its domain. 
• Adopts the target architecture and our AI-native SDLC practices. 
• Sits within a approx 170-strong engineering organisation across Delft, Budapest, and Kaiserslautern. 

What you'll do 

Provide technical direction 

• Set technical direction and standards for your teams' domain, alongside your engineers. 
• Make and steward the key technical decisions; uphold quality, security, and operational stability. 
• Contribute to system and architecture decisions for your domain with the Enterprise Architects and your peers. 

Grow the people 

• Coach and develop your engineers — including growing strong ones into senior and staff engineers. 
• Hire, and act on tough talent calls with clarity and care. 

Own the delivery and the bar 

• Own your teams' roadmap commitments and delivery and operational outcomes; protect cycle time, quality, and operational stability. 
• Keep review sustainable in an agentic SDLC — ensure your teams do not create excessive review burden or unnecessary code, match agent autonomy to the risk of the task, and keep human accountability clear. 
• Raise the engineering bar for your domain; make standards explicit and inspectable. 
• Operate agents yourself — build the subagents, evals, and patterns your team reuses, and contribute them back to the shared libraries. 

Technical environment 

Claude Code is our current primary agentic engineering environment: agents may plan and execute within defined constraints and governed environments, while engineers stay accountable for problem framing, architecture, acceptance criteria, security, verification, and production outcomes. Agent-generated work is backed by automated tests, runtime checks, reviewable evidence, and risk-based human approval — we match deterministic automation, structured workflows, or agents to the nature and risk of the task rather than maximising autonomy for its own sake. 

• Your domain: front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform — the specific stack depends on your teams' mission. 
• Legacy: Java, MS SQL, heritage architecture — being decomposed. 
• Modern: Python, TypeScript, Vue, Postgres, Azure, Kubernetes; cloud-native / service-oriented architecture; Terraform-managed infrastructure. 
• Mechanisms: subagents, MCP tool integrations, multi-agent workflows, and shared prompt, agent, and eval libraries. 

Success in your first year 

• Your teams reliably deliver their part of the domain's roadmap, with measurably better cycle time, quality, and stability. 
• Technical direction and standards for your domain are clear, owned, and upheld — the bar has gone up. 
• Your engineers have grown, including movement into senior or staff roles. 
• AI-native ways of working are normal in your team, with patterns and evals you contributed. 

Qualifications

Required 

• Engineering manager with a track record of growing engineers — including into senior and staff roles — and owning team delivery. 
• A strong technical foundation in a relevant domain (front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform) — you set team-level technical direction, not just run process. 
• Current, personal practice of AI-native software delivery (Claude Code or equivalent) — you can show your work and lead by example. 
• Strong on talent development; comfortable acting on tough calls. 
• Comfortable in ambiguity and inside legacy codebases; a strong communicator. 

Nice to have 

• Led a team through a significant technical or operating-model change. 
• Has built and shared subagents, evals, or CLAUDE.md conventions a team reused. 
• Deep domain expertise relevant to one of the product domains. 

Additional Information

What's in it for you 

• A strong focus on personal development — including, in the Netherlands, our “10 to Grow” programme: 10% of your time and budget for your own growth. 
• A hybrid working environment built on freedom, trust, and responsibility. 
• An open, informal, and supportive culture, with collaboration across national borders. 
• Excellent employment conditions. 

Want to apply? 

Does this sound like your next step? Apply with your CV and a short motivation letter via the application form. Tell us, with an example, how you gave both people and technical direction to a team — and what it shipped as a result. 

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Compensation: 7000 to 8250 (EUR) (MONTHLY)