Engineering Manager - Protect

About Hiya

At Hiya, we’re making business calls more trusted, useful, and effective.

Voice remains one of the most important ways businesses communicate with their customers, but the value of a call depends on trust. When customers do not recognize who is calling or why, important conversations are missed, customer relationships suffer, and business outcomes are harder to achieve.

Hiya helps businesses create trusted calling experiences that benefit both sides of the conversation: enterprises can reach customers with confidence, and customers can answer with confidence. Our products support branded business calling, trusted caller identity, call performance insights, customer engagement, and voice security capabilities that help businesses strengthen relationships and improve outcomes.

This role sits in a core business area for Hiya and is focused on helping SMB and enterprise customers succeed.

About the Role

Hiya’s Protect team builds the systems that detect spam and fraud calls for carriers and customers around the world. Our Budapest engineering team owns critical distributed cloud and data infrastructure that ingests signals, runs model predictions, and powers detection quality at scale.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead this Budapest-based team. You will manage approximately six engineers, own delivery and operational outcomes end to end, and partner closely with Product and Data Science to turn detection, reliability, and customer needs into clear execution plans.

This role is roughly 60% people and delivery leadership and 40% technical engagement. You will stay close enough to the systems to guide architecture, review designs, and unblock complex work, while building an autonomous team that can execute with clarity and ownership.

What You’ll Do

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of approximately six engineers.

• Create clear ownership, healthy delivery practices, and meaningful growth paths for each team member.

• Own delivery and operational outcomes for Protect Engineering, balancing roadmap commitments with reliability, security, technical debt, and data-sovereignty requirements.

• Partner with Product and Data Science to translate customer, carrier, and detection needs into clear priorities and executable plans.

• Guide the technical direction of distributed cloud and data systems used to detect spam and fraud calls.

• Establish predictable planning and execution rhythms, surface risks early, and coordinate dependencies across teams and locations.

• Strengthen production ownership through improved observability, incident response, performance management, and continuous improvement.

• Help the team adopt and improve AI-assisted software-development workflows while maintaining high standards for design, testing, security, code review, and operations.

• Act as a player-coach when needed by reviewing designs, unblocking technical work, and contributing to high-leverage initiatives.

• Manage stakeholder expectations with clarity, transparency, and sound judgment.

What Success Looks Like

• Within your first two months, you have built trusted relationships with your engineers, Product partners, and Data Science counterparts while learning the team’s systems and workflows.

• By month three, you have introduced clearer planning rhythms, earlier risk surfacing, and improved coordination around dependencies.

• Within your first year, the team operates with greater autonomy, clearer ownership, more predictable delivery, and stronger production operations.

• Detection quality, platform reliability, and delivery speed improve measurably under your leadership.

• AI-assisted development practices are adopted thoughtfully, with appropriate guardrails and clear evaluation of their impact.

• You are positioned for growth into broader leadership scope based on demonstrated impact.

What We’re Looking For

Required

• Around 7-8 years of relevant software engineering experience, including at least 3-4 years in an engineering leadership role.

• Experience leading, coaching, and developing software engineers through delegation, feedback, growth conversations, and performance management.

• Strong backend or distributed systems experience, with the ability to guide architecture and design trade-offs.

• Practical familiarity with AI-assisted software development, including the use of coding agents to plan, implement, test, or troubleshoot software.

• A track record of delivering and operating reliable production systems while balancing product delivery, platform health, security, and technical debt.

• Excellent cross-functional communication skills and the ability to turn ambiguous goals into clear priorities and delivery plans.

• Professional proficiency in English and the ability to collaborate across teams, disciplines, and locations.
  

Preferred

• Experience as a player-coach leading a small, highly technical engineering team.

• Experience building or operating high-volume, low-latency distributed systems.

• Background in fraud, spam, abuse, risk detection, or telecommunications.

• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, or other cloud-native production environments.

• Experience partnering closely with Data Science teams.

• Familiarity with SIP or other telecommunications technologies.

• Experience with Scala, Haskell, Python, or JavaScript codebases.

Benefits & Support

• Stock options, giving you ownership in Hiya’s continued growth

• Private retirement and pension program through Erste Bank

• Generali private healthcare

• Charity donation matching of up to $500 per year

• Work-from-home equipment stipend of up to $500 during your first year

• $1,000 annual professional development budget

• Online English classes

• Gym membership

• Flexible hybrid working model, with 3 days as required office days and flexibility to work from home or the Budapest office during the rest of the month

Come Work With Us!

We're building a team with diverse perspectives, identities, and professional experiences. We evaluate candidates through a business lens and believe that diversity and unique viewpoints make our company stronger, more dynamic, and a great place to build a career.

We've been recognized by Built In, GeekWire, Comparably, G2, Forbes, and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for our culture, innovation, leadership, compensation, and more. At Hiya, we're a people-centric company focused on helping each employee grow both personally and professionally. We create a culture of support and empowerment that challenges the status quo, resulting in an energized team that's passionate about their work. You'll love working here if you're looking for an innovative challenge that's disrupting an industry. Come join us!

Hiya is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive environment for all employees.