Senior Engineering Manager, Product Engineering

At Secfix we're building security compliance systems for teams and agents to become and stay compliant with less effort. We're already the category leader in Europe. AI is changing how software gets built, and we're shaping the tools this new era requires.

I've spent most of my career believing that the best engineering leaders aren't the ones who run the most meetings. They're the ones who make everyone around them faster, clearer, and more proud of their work — and they can do that because they've been through the hard technical problems themselves.

Since we started, I've done the engineering management myself: 1:1s, hiring, design reviews, performance conversations. The team is 8 engineers and 2 product designers, and I'm spread across too many things. If we were a football team, we'd be a good regional side that just made it to the Bundesliga — talented, hard-working, winning quite a few games. Now we need a coach who's played at Champions League level and can take us there to win every week.

That means a strong engineering manager who can still ship. Someone who owns the technical decisions, sets the pace, and has product taste — who notices when a feature takes three weeks that should take one, and when it ships on time but isn't good enough. You won't ship weekly — you'll need focus — but you'll build with the team often enough to know the playbook still works.

You'll work directly with me. Two things matter most here: speed and taste. Most teams pick one. We need both to win.

• Month 1: Ship. Get into the codebase and ship a meaningful feature with AI alongside the team. You don't need to be the fastest engineer in the room, but the team needs to see that you can build at the level you'll ask of them and can ask the right questions.
• Month 2: Make the team faster. Find where features take three weeks that should take one, and fix it — in tooling, in how we review and test, or in who's working on what. Start regular 1:1s with each engineer, focused on weekly output, quality, and how well they use AI.
• Month 3: Own hiring. Take over engineering interviews and build a process that runs without my oversight. Design the technical challenges, run the screens, make the calls. The next people we bring in should raise the pace again. I will be there but switch my focus to final interviews.
• Speed. You'll refine our software development processes to keep the team operating at high velocity. Cycle time from spec to production is your number and accountability. Tooling, review flow, how work is split, who's on what — whatever moves it.
• Quality. Improve how engineers test and automate, how they review each other's code and security changes, and how the zero-bug policy survives a team of 20.
• Team and hiring. Team structure, growth conversations, the hiring process, and eventually the next manager.
• AI in the craft — and in the management. Engineers already work with an established set of encoded skills and rules — there's a whole playbook; you keep pushing that. Same for your own work: hiring, 1:1s, the recurring stuff.

• 8+ years as a software engineer, including 4+ years managing a team of 8+ and hiring for it yourself
• You've shipped AI features to production — retrieval, RAG, agentic workflows — and you know the difference between a demo that works and one that holds up on real customer data
• Product taste: a keen sense for what makes a product feel great, and the habit of saying so when it doesn't
• You've built and shipped with Claude Code and Cursor in real production work, and you have opinions about where AI helps and where it quietly creates debt
• You're an engineer at heart. You were senior or principal before you managed, and you can still hold your own in a design review, a debugging session, or building a feature
• You've built something zero to one at a startup, or scaled a team through the messy middle. You know what it feels like when there's no playbook
• Able to work in European timezone (CET/CEST). EMEA-based, ideally Germany or UK
• You've managed a real team and made it ship faster. You've hired for it, run the hard conversations, and know what breaks as it grows — and you can point to where cycle time dropped because of you.
• You know what great engineers look like. You've thought deeply about what makes them productive, what holds them back, and how to move them forward — and you can spot one in a single interview.
• You have an exceptional IC track record before becoming a manager. You were a senior/principal engineer before you started managing — you didn't skip into management early because coding wasn't working out.
• You have product taste. You notice when a feature ships on time but isn't good enough, and you say so.
• You hold people to a high standard. You're comfortable giving direct feedback and having hard conversations about performance.
• You're hands-on with AI-assisted development. You've used Cursor and Claude Code in real production work, not just toy projects. You have opinions about how AI changes the engineering workflow from ideation to release, and you want to push a team to keep getting faster.
• You've worked in startups. You know what it feels like when there's low process, and the answer is "figure it out and ship it."
• You think engineering culture can stay startup-like at scale. You're optimistic that a small, high-performing team can stay that way as it grows, with little process.
• You communicate proactively in writing. In a remote team, written communication is how decisions get made and context gets shared. But you're not scared of jumping into a pair programming session either.
• You've grown a team to 15+ at a VC-funded startup
• Managed tech leads or a second manager
• Previous experience at a fully remote company

• Remote: 100% remote with a real virtual office in Gather
• Salary: Competitive, benchmarked to European market rates (we'll share specifics once we talk)
• Equity: Generous package — we're all owners here
• Development budget: €1,000/year — yours to spend on whatever makes you better
• Workspace: Remote workspace support + co-working access
• Holidays: 26 days + local public holidays
• Health insurance: Comprehensive coverage
• Annual retreat: Last time we went to Alicante 🇪🇸 — before that, the Austrian Alps, Portugal, Italy, and the Spanish Islands
• Tech: MacBook, monitors, headphones — the latest