Engineering Manager (Python) - AI/ML SaaS Platform
Engineering Manager – London OR Manchester - Salary up to £120k
We're hiring a Hands-On Engineering Manager with deep technical leadership experience across Python, large-scale data systems, and modern AWS infrastructure. You'll lead a squad of 4 engineers, guiding them through complex technical decisions and helping them deliver high-performance, data-intensive systems operating over hundreds of millions to billions of rows.
The product itself is an AI/ML-driven SaaS platform, and your contributions will train new models, enabling new features and having large greenfield elements to it.
This role blends hands-on technical context with people leadership, delivery focus, and architectural oversight. You'll drive engineering excellence, ensure high reliability, and cultivate a culture that values clarity, ownership, and strong execution.
What You'll Be Doing
- Lead and develop a squad of 4 engineers, supporting growth, coaching, and high-quality delivery.
- Set technical direction across Python services, distributed systems, and large-scale data processing.
- Work heavily with AWS — especially Redshift, Lambda, ECS, S3, plus data formats like Parquet.
- Shape high-throughput data pipelines and SQL-based workflows, ensuring scalability and performance.
- Run technical design reviews, guide architecture decisions, and support engineers in navigating trade-offs around performance, cost, and reliability.
- Champion operational excellence — strong observability, testing discipline, incident response, and SLO ownership.
- Collaborate with Product & Design to define technical requirements, prioritise roadmaps, and drive measurable outcomes.
Tech Environment You'll Influence
- Primary language: Python
- AWS stack: Redshift, Lambda, ECS, S3
- Data workflows: Parquet, SQL, distributed data pipelines
- Scale: systems processing hundreds of millions to billions of rows
- Focus areas: performance tuning, reliability, cost optimisation, architectural clarity
What You'll Bring
- Prior experience as an Engineering Manager or Tech Lead managing small, high-performing engineering teams.
- Strong technical background in Python, large-scale data systems, and cloud-native architectures (ideally AWS).
- Experience owning and improving complex data pipelines and high-throughput systems.
- Ability to coach engineers across multiple levels while maintaining hands-on architectural and design credibility.
- Excellent delivery management — simplifying ambiguity, unblocking dependencies, and driving predictable execution.
What Success Looks Like
- Your squad of 4 consistently delivers high-quality software and scalable data pipelines with predictable velocity.
- Clear improvements in system reliability, throughput, and cost efficiency.
- Strong engineering discipline across design, testing, observability, and incident management.
- Improved technical foundations and reduced operational toil.
- Clear, thoughtful communication and alignment across engineering, product, and design.