Software Engineering Manager (Hands-On, Frontend)

We're hiring an Engineering Manager who wants to spend 80% of their time writing code, not attending management meetings.

About the role

Are you an experienced Software Engineer who loves writing code, solving complex technical problems and helping other engineers become better at what they do?

At Pigment, our Engineering Managers are engineers first.

Unlike traditional Engineering Manager positions, this role is designed for someone who wants to remain deeply involved in building software while taking on meaningful people-management responsibilities.

You'll spend approximately 80% of your time designing, coding and shipping production features, with the remaining 20% dedicated to coaching engineers, running regular 1:1s, providing feedback and supporting their development.

We're particularly interested in Senior Software Engineers who have naturally taken on coaching, mentoring or technical leadership responsibilities and are ready to develop further as people managers.

You don't necessarily need to have held an Engineering Manager title before. What matters most is your technical ability, your experience helping others grow and your motivation to combine engineering with people leadership.

You'll join Pigment's Reporting & Collaboration community, building sophisticated frontend experiences that help customers interact with complex data, configure workflows and make better business decisions.

🧑‍💻 Software Engineering (80%)

You'll remain an active contributor to our production codebase, working alongside other engineers on challenging frontend projects.

• Write, review, refactor and ship production code regularly using React, TypeScript and JavaScript.

• Design and build sophisticated user interfaces for interacting with large datasets, including filtering, visualisation and complex configuration.

• Take ownership of engineering tasks and features from technical design through implementation, testing and deployment.

• Solve challenging problems involving frontend performance, scalability, state management and user experience.

• Participate in technical discussions, code reviews, debugging and architectural decisions.

• Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Designers, Tech Leads and Software Engineers to deliver high-quality features.

• Contribute to AI-powered product experiences and use modern development tools where appropriate.

• Maintain the same technical expectations and engineering standards as our Senior Software Engineers.

You'll continue to write production code, not simply oversee the engineers who do.


📚 Coaching & People Management (20%)

Alongside your engineering responsibilities, you'll help other engineers develop their skills, confidence and careers.

• Coach and mentor engineers, sharing technical knowledge and helping them improve their problem-solving abilities.

• Hold regular 1:1 meetings with your direct reports to discuss progress, challenges and career development.

• Provide constructive feedback, recognise achievements and support individual development plans.

• Help engineers establish clear goals and understand the skills required to progress.

• Support performance reviews and development discussions, including more challenging conversations when necessary.

• Work alongside Tech Leads to understand engineers' technical contributions and development needs.

• Help foster a collaborative engineering culture where people continuously learn from one another.

At Pigment, technical leadership and people management are intentionally separated. Tech Leads own the technical direction of teams, while Engineering Managers focus on coaching and developing engineers alongside their own coding responsibilities.

You'll initially focus on contributing as a Senior Engineer before gradually taking on direct reports.

You're an engineer first, with a genuine interest in developing people.

• You have substantial professional software-engineering experience and are technically operating at a strong Senior Engineer level.

• You're currently hands-on with production code and want coding to remain the majority of your working week.

• You have strong frontend development experience with React, TypeScript and JavaScript.

• You've built complex, scalable applications, ideally within B2B SaaS, enterprise software, analytics or data-intensive environments.

• You have experience coaching, mentoring or supporting other engineers through code reviews, pairing, technical discussions or structured feedback.

• You enjoy sharing knowledge and helping other engineers improve.

• You're interested in taking ownership of 1:1s, career development and people-management responsibilities, or already have experience doing so.

• You're comfortable solving complex technical challenges independently while collaborating with others.

• You care about product quality, engineering standards and delivering meaningful value to customers.

• You're fluent in English. French is not required.

Previous formal people-management experience is a plus, but not a requirement. We're equally interested in strong Senior Engineers who have demonstrated the ability to coach others and are ready to take the next step.

Because Engineering Managers at Pigment spend approximately 80% of their time coding, they go through the same core technical assessments as our Software Engineers.

We want you to understand these expectations from the beginning.

1️⃣  Technical Screen

A technical discussion including a 15-minute code refactoring exercise.

AI assistance is not permitted during the refactoring exercise.

2️⃣  Live Coding

A hands-on algorithmic coding interview focused on problem-solving, code quality and technical reasoning.

AI assistance is not permitted.

3️⃣  System Design

A discussion exploring your approach to designing software systems, evaluating technical trade-offs and solving complex engineering problems.

4️⃣  Final Interview with the EML (Engineering Manager Lead)

A conversation exploring your motivation, engineering mindset, approach to coaching and alignment with Pigment's culture and expectations.

Important: Our Engineering Managers are assessed against the same senior technical engineering standards as our Software Engineers. This is a role for people who genuinely enjoy coding and want to keep doing it.

You'll probably love this role if:

• You enjoy writing code more than spending your day in management meetings.

• You're a strong Senior Engineer who wants to help others grow.

• You want to develop people-management skills without moving away from engineering.

• You enjoy the challenge of balancing meaningful individual contributions with coaching responsibilities.

This probably isn't the right role if:

• You're looking to move away from hands-on software development.

• You prefer managing delivery, budgets and team strategy over building software.

• You haven't written production code regularly for some time.

• You're looking for a traditional Engineering Manager position where engineering work is mainly delegated to others.

At Pigment, you don't have to choose between being an excellent engineer and helping other engineers grow.