Engineering Manager

Akeneo is the product experience (PX) company and global leader in Product Information Management (PIM); creating a world where every product interaction is an experience that guides consumers and professionals to the best purchase, anytime, anywhere. Akeneo empowers business leaders with software, education, and an engaged community all focused on the practice of product experience management.

At Akeneo, our teammates are the driving force behind who we are and where we want to go as a company. We work every day to shape a first-class work environment and culture, which is rooted in our core values of Humble Hunger, Diligent Benevolence, Responsible Pioneers and Inclusive Community! Our Purple Fire isn’t just a set of values; it’s our unique way of igniting passion and driving excellence. Bold and fun, with a hint of the unexpected - it is the essence of who we are. We want our people to help us grow and to grow with us, and that’s why we do whatever it takes to equip our employees with everything they may need to make a tangible impact on themselves, the business and the company. Let our intrepid three-headed mascot #ZiggyTheHydra welcome you into her world and join us at Akeneo! Learn more about who we are as an employer and about our Culture and Values via our Career page.

Job description

We are seeking an exceptional Engineering Leader with a strong bias towards action and impact to join our growing team. Our organisation follows an AWS-inspired structure, where each Product Line operates independently under a Single Threaded Owner (STO) at VP level. Within each Product Line, multiple Area Single Threaded Owners (Area-STOs) at Director level guide several Impact Teams. Each Impact Team is a cross-functional unit of approximately eight engineers, designers, and PMs who work autonomously, driving innovation through their own processes and methodologies.

This Engineering Manager role leads the Assets Impact team, which is revolutionising how our customers prepare and manage their assets across any retail channel. You will be crucial in shaping both the technical direction and the team culture, developing robust, scalable solutions that unlock our platform's next phase of growth. Success in this role means owning outcomes, driving execution, and delivering measurable impact within defined parameters.

As a leader, your primary focus will be creating outsized impact through others. You'll build and develop a high-performing team while ensuring technical excellence and sustainable delivery. Reporting directly to the Assets Area-STO, you will work closely with engineers, product managers, designers, and stakeholders to drive our engineering initiatives forward.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership: Build and develop high-performing teams through effective hiring, coaching, and performance management. (e.g., conducting weekly 1:1s, providing real-time feedback, creating individual development plans, and driving impact)
• Delivery Excellence: Drive, with a strong sense of urgency, the successful execution towards customer impacts while maintaining high quality standards and quality. (e.g., tracking metrics, unblocking, and managing dependencies)
• Technical Strategy: Guide technical decisions and architecture choices within your team's domain while balancing immediate needs with long-term sustainability. (e.g., collaborating with Staff Engineers on architecture decisions, managing technical debt, ensuring quality and scalability)
• Operational Leadership: Implement, optimise or remove team processes to maximise effectiveness, creativity and innovation while maintaining team health. (e.g., protecting deep work time, accelerating decisions, conducting retrospectives)
• Cross-functional Partnership: Foster strong relationships with Product, Design, and other engineering teams to ensure aligned execution and optimal outcomes. (e.g., participating in product strategy sessions, facilitating cross-team dependencies, aligning on success metrics)
• People Development: Create growth opportunities and career development paths for team members while building an inclusive and innovative team culture. (e.g., creating learning opportunities, mentoring engineers, facilitating team building activities)

Qualifications

• Extensive Experience: You have 5+ years of experience in hands-on software development, with a strong background in building SaaS solutions that scale. You are a builder. You have 2+ years of experience leading engineering teams, with demonstrated success in hiring, developing, and retaining highly creative talent.
• Leadership Skills: You have demonstrated leadership in previous roles, guiding teams through technical challenges over time and delivering impact directly as well as indirectly. You are a leader of people.
• Proven Track Record: You have a history of delivering impact end-to-end as well as taking ownership to turn around projects. You are a doer.
• Technical Expertise: You have a strong understanding of software architecture principles and best practices, with the ability to guide technical decisions without being the primary code contributor. You are able to experiment, create prototypes and contribute if needed.
• Strategic & Analytical Thinking: You have the ability to balance short-term delivery with long-term technical health, and to make informed, data-driven decisions. You navigate complex technical and organisational challenges by thinking deeply and critically.
• Communication Skills: You have excellent verbal and written communication abilities, with experience in presenting technical concepts to various audiences and stakeholders.
• Adaptability: You thrive in a fast-paced, impact focused environment and can handle uncertainties and changing requirements with ease.

Life at Akeneo  

Culture

🌎 Diverse, cross-cultural team.

🎉 Annual All Staff gathering week, office parties, team offsites

👋 Top-notch 8-week onboarding program for new teammates, including live presentations, online courses you can take at your own pace, and an exhaustive checklist with all the resources, calls-to-action and support contacts for smooth integration into the company

General

💰 Competitive package and complementary health insurance.

Time off

⏰ Flexible working hours and hybrid setup (up to 3-4 days per week working from home).

👶 26 weeks paid maternity leave (30 days paid leave if you are the second parent).

💼 Gradual Return to Work program after maternity or adoption leave.

🌴 25 days holiday per calendar year in addition to UK Public Holidays.

🏝️ Work from Anywhere Scheme - Explore the possibility of working from anywhere in the world for up to 30 days per year.

Health & Wellness

🧘 Individual and confidential coaching sessions with a mental health practitioner of your choice.

Equipment

🔊 Best-in-class communication and collaboration tools: Slack, Notion, Google Suite, Jira, GitHub...

💸 A £450 personal hybrid working allowance to maximize your home office environment.

Professional Development

🎫 Participation in in-house events welcoming external guests (i.e. Meetups) or industry events.

🧑‍🏫 A £1,000 learning budget per employee per year.

Perks & Discounts

🚲 An £80/month Sustainable Transportation Allowance to support eco-friendly commuting options such as public transportation, biking, or carpooling if eligible. 

Corporate Responsibility

🤲 Employee Volunteering program: give back to the community with two days per year dedicated to supporting the charities of your choice.

🌈 Join one or several of our Employee Resource Groups and take an active part in promoting diversity and inclusion within our company.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Diversity & Inclusion: Akeneo provides and ensures a safe work environment for everyone, regardless of seniority, gender identity, and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other characteristics. Akeneo is deeply anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, and inclusive. We create the right conditions for you to feel safe and be yourself!

Interview process

All interviews will be conducted remotely and ideally within two weeks, depending on your availability. We are asking for a total of around seven hours of your time. There are no take home exercises, coding tests or surprises. We will not continue the process if you do not pass a step, this is to save you time and effort. If we decided not to move forward we will provide you with feedback.

• Screening
  • Phone Screen: If your application has caught our attention, you will receive an invitation to a short conversation with one of our Talent Acquisition Specialists, where you'll learn more about the role and about Akeneo.
  • Hiring Manager Chat: This short interview will allow you to go in more depth into what the role entails and discuss your experience and skills.
• General Interview Loop: These interviews ensure you are qualified to join Akeneo and that you have what the Product Line needs at this point in time. Before each interview you will receive an email detailing the types of questions you will be asked and who your interviewers will be so you can research and prepare.
  • Technical Deep Dive: You will spend two hours with the CTO and our most senior Staff Engineer to discuss how you would solve a complex problem with limited knowledge and understanding. They are looking to see how you think critically, expose gaps, navigate ambiguity, focus on impact and execute.
  • Behavioural Deep Dive: You will spend two hours with a cross-functional panel of peers. They are looking to see what it's like to work with you and how you add to our values. This interview relies heavily on examples from your past, so take some time to think back and write down some so you are best prepared. We want to emphasise that the purpose of this interview is not to "test" you. Instead, our goal is to create an environment and opportunities for you to express yourself fully, allowing us to understand your years of experience in a short timeframe. We encourage you to think of the interviewers as collaborators, there to ensure you have every opportunity to shine. We're genuinely interested in learning about your experiences, thought processes, and approaches to problem-solving.
• Team Interviews: The general interview loop will assess your technical skills, personality and how you can add to our culture. During this process we will gain an understanding of where you fit best within the organisation and will select the team.
  • Area-STO & Impact Owner: You will spend an hour with the leaders of the team we feel you are best suited to. They will discuss what they are working on, some of the challenges they are facing and will be keen to see how you might be able to help.
  • Team Meet: Your entire team will want to meet you at this point for an hour to see if you are someone that they would like to work with and learn from. The team will be curious about you as a person and what you want for your next chapter.

At all stages of your recruitment process, our Talent Acquisition team is committed to giving you an update in a one-week time frame.

So? Is this job description all about you? Then what are you waiting for - click that Apply button so that we can meet you without further delay!
Feeling hesitant because you think you’re not checking 100% of the requirements for the job, but still feel confident and motivated to grow into the position? Don’t hesitate to apply anyway, or reach out to us for questions or clarifications!