Engineering manager

Engineering Manager

GFT is a pioneer in digital transformation. We design AI-centric business solutions, modernize IT infrastructures and develop next-generation core systems for leaders in the banking, insurance and industrial sectors. In close collaboration with our customers, we challenge boundaries to help them reach their full potential. Are you driven by innovation and ready to create the future of banking? At GFT, we're teaming up with DKB Group to launch a tech hub in Valencia, focused on developing sustainable, next-generation software.

Be part of a pioneering team that will reshape the banking industry.

Serving as a unifying leader for a team managing critical customer lifecycle domains - including Personal Master Data, Tax & Exemption Orders, and Power of Attorney - the Engineering Manager cultivates a high-trust environment to drive continuous improvement, aligning technical strategy with broader business goals. The EM empowers a team of talented engineers to build performant and reliable systems which increase customer satisfaction, by promoting collaboration, innovation, a commitment to excellence, and dedicated to fostering the professional growth of every team member.

If you're looking for an exciting challenge and the chance to grow your career, we want to hear from you!

Your main responsibilities will be:

• Talent Acquisition Partnership:
  Actively collaborate with HR to successfully hire and onboard all engineering positions.
• Full Operational & Development Readiness for Person APIs:
  Successfully complete the handover of the existing Services/APIs, achieving full operational and development autonomy for the new team.
• Stakeholder Alignment:
  Established active and self-driven working relationships between the team, PO and relevant (Business) stakeholders, evidenced by the team autonomously managing the top 3 priorities and dependencies for the combined domains.
• Sustained Team Momentum and Foundational Growth:
  Maintain a highly engaged team with 0% voluntary attrition among the newly hired engineers in the first 12 months. This stability is underpinned by 100% of new hires successfully completing a structured, domain-focused learning path (documented and reviewed by the EM) and receiving consistent, actionable coaching from the EM to ensure rapid integration into the team's delivery cycle.

Required Skills:

• Joint Strategic Prioritization (EM-PO Partnership):
  Competency in establishing a highly effective partnership with the Product Owner (PO) to jointly discuss, align, and prioritize the strategic balance between business feature delivery and critical technical initiatives (e.g., defect mitigation, technical debt resolution, and refactoring), ensuring optimal long-term value.
• Active Technical Leadership & Contribution:
  The ability to maintain technical credibility and currency by participating in high-leverage activities like system design and deep code reviews. Direct coding contributions are managed pragmatically to unblock the team or ensure operational stability, while strictly preserving focus on strategic management responsibilities.
• Intellectual Stimulation & Regulatory Challenge:
  The ability to actively foster deep, cross-paradigm architectural discussions (e.g., Reactive vs. MVC) while simultaneously channeling the team's curiosity to solve complex compliance and regulatory constraints inherent in the Person Master Data and Tax domains. The EM leverages technical diversity and regulatory challenges as primary drivers for continuous learning and innovative, compliant solutions.
• Strategic Stack Stewardship:
  Demonstrates the ability to manage and justify the coexistence of divergent technical paradigms (e.g., Reactive Kotlin vs. MVC Spring Boot), ensuring each stack is optimally chosen for its specific business and performance requirements (High-Throughput vs. Low-Traffic).
• Cross-Paradigm Coaching & Integrated Domain Expertise:
  Competency in leveraging the deliberate diversity of paradigms (Reactive vs. MVC) as a growth area. The EM ensures that deep expertise in both stacks AND the functional/regulatory logic of the Person Master Data, Tax, and Power of Attorney domains is built within the team. This is achieved through dedicated mentoring and knowledge-sharing initiatives, thereby managing cognitive overhead and fostering the engineers' ability to architecturally contextualize solutions that meet both technical performance and regulatory compliance requirements.
• Strategic Talent Acquisition for Stack Agility:
  Ability to strategically steer the recruitment process to acquire engineers who either possess immediate subject matter expertise in one of the diverging stacks (Reactive Kotlin/Coroutines or MVC) or demonstrate strong potential for rapidly learning the complementary paradigm, ensuring the team's long-term technical agility.
• Cultivating Psychological Safety:
  The ability to create an environment where team members feel safe to make mistakes and voice candid criticism without fear of negative…