Senior Engineering Manager

Who are We?

Grip is the AI-powered, end-to-end event platform built for engagement. The flexible system helps commercial event organisers like Ascential, Hyve, Emerald and Clarion Events boost revenue by establishing, maintaining and tracking relationships between participants over multiple events. This is possible because Grip goes beyond networking. It combines AI with billions of interactions happening across the platform with a powerful event management system, seamless registration and award-winning mobile event app so participants meet the right people at the right time.

We are hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead and grow the Manage Squad — the team responsible for Grip's best-in-class event registration platform, handling complex configurations and integrations, payments, data pipelines, on-site technologies like smart badges and location telemetry, and key backend infrastructure. As Grip moves increasingly AI‑first, this role is critical in ensuring that AI‑native thinking shapes how the Manage Squad builds, ships, and evolves its systems.

This is a senior management role that sits at the intersection of people management, technical excellence, and product delivery. Reporting directly to the CPO, you will lead a squad of roughly four direct reports — including 3 senior and 1 mid full‑stack engineer — and be accountable for everything the Manage Squad ships: its quality, pace, architecture, and long‑term health.

You will work closely with the Engineering Director for the Engage Squad, the Head of Platform, the VP of Engineering Operations. Equally important is your partnership with the Product Manager and Designer for the Manage domain — reviewing upcoming product initiatives, assessing feasibility, and balancing feature delivery with platform improvements.

The Manage Squad is building a best-in-class event registration platform. The team deals with complex event configurations and third‑party integrations, handles payments and financial data, feeds Grip's core data pipelines and insights, and works on exciting on‑site technologies including smart badges and location telemetry.

Our core stack includes Type Script (Node.js, React), MongoDB & Postgres. We use AWS for our cloud services and our infrastructure is managed with Kubernetes and Terraform. We test with Jest and Cypress, and monitor our systems with Prometheus, Grafana and Sentry.

We embrace building with AI to help us deliver faster and better, and we're looking for someone who is genuinely excited by this new era of software development and the opportunities it brings. At Grip, AI is not an afterthought — it is central to how we build, how we ship, and how we think about the future of our platform.

• Lead, mentor and grow a team of approximately four engineers, including a Principal Engineer and full‑stack engineers
• Run effective 1:1s, career conversations, and performance reviews using Grip's progression framework
• Foster a culture of psychological safety, high standards, and continuous improvement
• Own hiring and onboarding for the Manage Squad in partnership with Engineering leadership

• Partner closely with the Product Manager and Designer to review upcoming initiatives, assess feasibility, and surface technical risks early
• Own the squad's delivery cadence — sprint planning, prioritisation, and release quality
• Balance feature delivery with ongoing investment in platform health: tech debt, refactoring, security, and governance
• Take ownership of features from start to finish using agile methodologies, delivering with feature flags, tests, and observability
• Champion high‑quality technical communications: proposals, specs, testing reports, and release planning
• Drive AI‑first ways of working within the squad — embedding AI tooling into development workflows, code review, testing, and delivery

• Drive architectural consistency, code quality, and engineering best practice within the Manage Squad
• Work closely with the Head of Platform to align Manage's architecture with the wider platform vision
• Identify…