Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager

XCM is building Horizon, a modern customer data platform focused on scalable, integration-heavy data handling. We are looking for an Engineering Manager to help build and scale a high-performing engineering team capable of delivering ambitious platform capabilities with speed, quality, and operational excellence.

This is a highly hands-on leadership role for someone who combines strong engineering judgement with the ability to lead a Team of 10-12 directly, improve delivery capability, and contribute meaningfully to the technical execution of the platform.

The role will report to the CTO and work closely alongside them. The CTO retains ownership of overall technical vision, platform architecture, and R&D direction, while the Engineering Manager will play a key role in driving day-to-day engineering execution, supporting the development team, and taking operational and delivery responsibilities off the CTO’s plate.

We are not looking for a traditional people manager removed from engineering. This role is for a player-manager who enjoys staying close to the technology, contributing to technical discussions, supporting engineers directly, and helping build a lean, highly capable engineering organisation designed for the next generation of AI-enabled software development.

What You’ll Be Responsible For

Engineering Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, mentor, and support a team of Software Engineers
• Recruit, mentor, and develop exceptional engineers
• Create a high-performance engineering culture focused on ownership, quality, pragmatism, and continuous improvement
• Provide hands-on technical leadership and guidance to engineers
• Support recruitment, onboarding, and development of engineering talent
• Establish clear engineering standards, expectations, and accountability
• Help engineers grow through coaching, feedback, and technical mentorship
• Lead by example through strong technical judgement and delivery focus
• Stay close to the day-to-day engineering work and contribute directly where needed
• Act as a force multiplier for the CTO by helping manage operational engineering responsibilities

Delivery & Execution

• Improve engineering execution, predictability, and delivery capability
• Help the team ship high-quality software rapidly and safely
• Build scalable engineering processes appropriate for a fast-growing technology company
• Improve development workflows, testing practices, release processes, and operational maturity
• Work closely with Product and the CTO to align engineering priorities with business goals
• Remove blockers and improve collaboration across teams
• Drive continuous improvements in engineering effectiveness and developer productivity
• Support sprint planning, prioritisation, and execution without introducing unnecessary process or bureaucracy

AI-Enabled Engineering

XCM believes advances in generative AI will fundamentally reshape how high-performing engineering organisations operate over the coming years.

We believe small teams of highly capable engineers, equipped with the right tooling and workflows, will be able to deliver dramatically greater impact than traditional engineering organisations of the past.

The Engineering Manager will play an important role in helping shape what this looks like in practice.

This includes:

• Driving adoption of AI-assisted engineering workflows
• Improving developer productivity through tooling and automation
• Exploring AI-assisted approaches to testing, debugging, documentation, operations, and software delivery
• Encouraging experimentation with modern engineering tooling and workflows
• Maintaining strong engineering quality and discipline in AI-assisted development environments
• Helping evolve engineering practices that maximise the effectiveness of small, highly capable teams

We are not looking for superficial familiarity with AI tools. We are looking for someone excited by the opportunity to rethink how modern engineering teams operate and who has strong ideas around how AI will influence software engineering over the coming years.

Technical Contribution & Collaboration

• Contribute actively to technical and architectural discussions
• Collaborate closely with the CTO on platform evolution and technical direction
• Support engineering delivery across cloud-native systems, APIs, integrations, distributed systems, and data-intensive applications
• Help ensure systems are scalable, reliable, maintainable, and operationally mature
• Support strong engineering decision-making across the team
• Help evolve technical standards and engineering practices over time
• Remain close to implementation details and engineering challenges rather than operating purely at a management layer

What We’re Looking For

Essential Experience

• Significant experience leading software engineering teams in a product or platform environment
• Strong software engineering background with high technical credibility
• Experience managing and mentoring individual engineers directly
• Experience improving engineering delivery, operational maturity, and team effectiveness
• Strong understanding of modern cloud-native engineering practices
• Experience with distributed systems, APIs, integrations, and data-intensive platforms
• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving startup or scale-up environment
• Strong communication and leadership skills
• Willingness to remain hands-on and close to technical delivery
• Strong interest in AI-enabled software engineering and developer productivity

Ideal Characteristics

We’re likely to be a strong fit if you:

• Prefer building over bureaucracy
• Care deeply about engineering quality and execution
• Still enjoy being close to technology and delivery
• Want to lead engineers directly rather than manage layers of management
• Lead through judgement and technical credibility rather than process alone
• Believe small, highly capable teams can outperform much larger organisations
• Have strong opinions on how AI will change software engineering
• Enjoy improving systems, teams, and ways of working
• Balance pragmatism with high standards
• Are excited by ownership, ambiguity, and helping scale engineering capability from the ground up

Technology Environment

• Our environment includes areas such as:
• Cloud-native distributed systems
• Event-driven architecture
• APIs and integrations
• Data platforms and analytics systems
• Containerised infrastructure and orchestration
• Modern developer tooling and automation

Technology exposure should include:

• .NET / C#
• Kubernetes
• Kafka and streaming systems
• Clickhouse and analytical platforms
• Python
• React / Typescript and modern frontend tooling
• Infrastructure automation and observability tooling
• Azure
• Breadth of engineering judgement is more important than experience with every specific technology.

• What Success Looks Like
• Over the first 12–24 months, success in this role is likely to include:
• Establishing a strong and scalable engineering organisation
• Recruiting and retaining exceptional engineers
• Delivery of immediate product priorities
• Introducing high-quality engineering standards without excessive process overhead
• Improving operational maturity and platform reliability
• Establishing AI-enabled engineering workflows and tooling
• Building a high-trust, high-performance engineering culture
• Helping XCM scale platform delivery capability without scaling bureaucracy

• Why This Role Is Exciting
• This is an opportunity to help shape what a modern engineering organisation looks like in an AI-native world and within an exiting and fast growing business.
• You’ll join at a stage where foundational platform capabilities are still being built, meaning there is significant opportunity to shape engineering culture, practices, tooling, and team evolution from the ground up.
• The role offers substantial scope for growth and increasing technical leadership responsibility over time as the platform and organisation mature.