Engineering Manager

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for an Engineering Manager based in Italy. Lead the engineering team responsible for the core capabilities at the heart of a global SaaS platform. You’ll own technical direction and delivery while helping modernize systems that support critical client workflows. A major focus will be bringing AI and agentic workflows into the product, enabling systems to plan, execute, and adapt testing activities. You’ll balance hands-on engineering with team leadership, spending approximately 20–30% of your time contributing directly to the codebase. Working closely with Product and AI/ML partners, you’ll shape multi-quarter strategy, architecture, and roadmap priorities. You’ll also raise engineering standards around reliability, observability, security, and operational excellence. The role offers significant autonomy within a fully remote, asynchronous, and globally distributed environment. Lead and mentor a team of engineers, providing technical direction, coaching, and support while creating an environment of ownership and continuous improvement. Own the technical direction, architecture, and delivery roadmap for the core platform domains, working closely with Product and AI/ML stakeholders. Design and deliver agentic workflows that enable AI systems to plan, execute, and adapt testing activities with increasing autonomy. Remain hands-on, dedicating approximately 20–30% of your time to production code, critical code reviews, technical designs, and resolving complex engineering bottlenecks. Modernize legacy systems, consolidate fragmented data models, improve transactional integrity, and reduce accumulated technical debt without disrupting production. Establish effective engineering practices around planning, prioritization, design reviews, technical standards, and delivery quality. Own production support and escalations, leading triage, root-cause analysis, and permanent fixes while reducing recurring operational issues. Define and monitor service-level objectives, performance metrics, dashboards, and observability practices to improve reliability and system performance. Maintain strong engineering standards, including clear ownership, traceability, consistent Definition of Done practices, application security, and efficient cloud usage. Introduce AI-assisted development practices into everyday engineering workflows and reduce knowledge silos through documentation, reviews, and collaboration. Partner cross-functionally to translate business and product strategy into a sequenced technical roadmap and deliver outcomes from discovery through production. Requirements: 5+ years of engineering management experience, ideally leading teams of four or more engineers in agile, remote environments. Recent hands-on experience writing production code and designing, evolving, or maintaining production systems. Strong ability to contribute directly to a codebase, perform substantive code reviews, make architectural decisions, and unblock complex technical challenges. Hands-on experience building LLM-powered or agentic features in production, including areas such as orchestration, tool use, retrieval, or evaluation, or a demonstrated ability to lead teams into emerging technical domains. Strong technical affinity with TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, and React, with solid API design and development experience. Familiarity with GraphQL and Kafka is an advantage. Experience with observability and application performance monitoring tools such as New Relic, Datadog, or Sentry. Experience diagnosing and optimizing slow database transactions and improving application performance. Knowledge of application security best practices and experience integrating security considerations into the software development lifecycle. Demonstrated experience modernizing legacy platforms and reducing significant technical debt while maintaining reliable producti