Engineering Manager

We’re a global team of over 400 people, working together to push the boundaries of open‑source technology and multi‑cloud solutions. Our vision is to help developers, builders, and creators bring their ideas to life with speed and simplicity, by providing a cloud data platform that makes open‑source databases, search, streaming, and application infrastructure easily accessible to everyone.

We are looking for a skilled Engineering Manager to lead our App Layer Platform team. This is a critical role focused on providing a reliable, scalable and secure platform for Aiven’s app layer.

You will report to the Head of Developer Experience, working closely with your engineering team and product manager to drive revenue through three core responsibilities:

• Operational Excellence:
  Ensure the delivery of our App platform GA offering and its reliability, scaling and security.
• Customer Satisfaction:
  Support our existing external customer base by resolving escalated support issues and collaborating with them to understand and solve their needs.
• Platform Optimization and Differentiation:
  Ideate and develop innovative new features that enable the App platform to support current and future use cases in rapid, resource‑optimised and cost effective ways.

• Strategic Planning:
  Partner with the Product Manager and Domain Head to create the team's roadmap, balancing business growth with essential engineering initiatives. Ability to identify technical debt, and balance innovation with stability is vital.
• Project Management:
  Oversee the team's backlog and projects, providing clear, timely, and actionable updates to stakeholders on progress and potential blockers.
• Leadership & Delivery:
  Champion a culture of urgency and ownership to deliver impactful results. You'll be accountable for the team's delivery in all aspects, including quality, security, and reliability.
• Team Enablement:
  Empower your team to act as "product custodians" by consistently addressing foundational and production issues.
• Performance & Development:
  Provide clear goals and feedback to manage expectations and drive both individual and team performance.
• Team Facilitation:
  Lead team meetings, such as planning sessions and retrospectives, to continuously improve workflows and delivery.
• Culture Building:
  Foster a psychologically safe, high‑trust environment where curiosity and healthy debate are encouraged.
• Collaboration:
  
  Ensure effective communication and collaboration both within the team and across the wider organization across Europe and American timezones.
• AI Enablement:
  Lead the team enablement and adoption on AI coding tooling.

Our engineering managers have a hands‑on programming background, and we expect them to have a meaningful say in technical conversations. While we typically look for at least five years of hands‑on experience and two years in a people leadership role, your accomplishments matter more than years on a resume. Whether you’re a manager with a strong technical core, or a staff engineer looking to dive deeper into people leadership, we want to hear about the products you’ve shipped, the impact they had, and what you learned along the way.

• People Leadership: A proven track record of leading diverse teams, from junior to senior engineers, to successfully deliver software products.
• Product Thinking: A strong product sense that enables your team to design innovative, cloud‑native products that stay ahead of the curve.
• Communication:
  Excellent communication skills in English, with the ability to effectively engage directly with customers.
• Adaptability:
  The ability to bring order and clarity to a dynamic, ambiguous environment, a trait essential in a fast‑growing tech company.
• Team Building:
  Experience in recruiting engineering talent and a deep understanding of what it takes to build and retain high‑performing teams.
• Agile Expertise:
  Experience with agile software development methodologies.

• App platform:
  Extensive experience with containerization and workload orchestration at scale.
• Reliability Engineering:
  Can develop and enforce SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs. Able to support…