Sr. Engineering Manager

About the opportunity

As Senior Engineering Manager
, you will lead multiple engineering teams (typically 4 squads, ~20 engineers) across a single technical domain. You’re accountable for:

• Domain-level technical strategy – work with product leadership and your teams to define a 12–18 month technical vision for your domain
• Team health and growth – build an environment where engineers thrive: hiring, developing ICs, mentoring junior managers, and creating psychological safety
• Delivery excellence – guide your teams through discovery, planning, and execution using small-batch delivery and continuous feedback loops
• Business impact – translate product objectives into technical solutions; quantify and communicate the impact of your domain’s work
• Cross-functional leadership – work closely with product, design, and business partners to resolve ambiguity and drive alignment
• Technical decision-making – guide your teams on system design, architecture, and engineering practices while maintaining talabat’s standards for scalability, security, and performance

90 days: You have onboarded your teams, understood their technical roadmap and pain points, and delivered your first feedback to your manager on domain health and near-term priorities.

6 months: Your teams are shipping value consistently; you have identified one emerging technical leader and started mentoring them; you have coached your teams through at least one cross-domain initiative; code quality and shipping velocity are on track or improving.

12 months: Your domain has a clear technical vision communicated across the org; you have grown at least one engineer significantly (either toward IC4/Staff or toward management); your teams ship with confidence; you are contributing to 1–2 strategic initiatives beyond your domain; you are mentoring or developing a potential future manager.

• 4+ years of hands‑on technical leadership experience managing engineering teams
• Demonstrated ability to hire, mentor, and grow engineers – we care about your track record of developing people, not just technical skills
• Comfort with cross-functional leadership: working with product, design, business partners, and other engineering teams
• Emotional intelligence: you navigate ambiguity, handle conflict constructively, and create psychological safety for your teams

• 8+ years of hands‑on software engineering experience in production systems
• Deep understanding of at least one of: distributed systems, backend systems, data platforms, mobile platforms, or web-scale infrastructure
• Proven ability to work across diverse technology stacks – we care that you’ve made architecture decisions that matter, not that you’ve used every specific tool
• Hands‑on understanding of XP practices: TDD, pair programming, continuous refactoring, and trunk-based development (or strong willingness to learn and lead talabat’s approach)

• You think about non-functional requirements: scalability, reliability, latency, cost efficiency, and security — not just feature delivery
• You’ve navigated the tradeoffs between speed and technical debt; you know when to optimize and when to simplify
• You’ve led or been part of domain-level decisions (tech stack migrations, architectural changes, platform initiatives)

• Experience leading multiple teams or a domain in a high-growth environment
• Exposure to eXtreme Programming practices (XP culture is learnable but experience is valuable)
• Background in marketplace, delivery, or logistics optimization
• Experience mentoring or developing other engineering managers
• Familiarity with modern cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)

talabat is the leading on-demand food and non-food delivery platform in MENA, operating across 8 countries and processing hundreds of millions of orders annually.

We’re part of Delivery Hero, the global leader in online food delivery and q-commerce, and we’re engineering-first. Our teams operate under eXtreme Programming (XP) principles – TDD, pair programming, continuous refactoring, and trunk-based development. We believe q…