Engineering Manager in London

About Arena Club

At Arena Club, we're igniting a collectibles revolution. Backed by legendary 5× World Series Champion Derek Jeter and trailblazer Brian Lee, we've launched the first-ever digital card show—a dynamic marketplace where innovation, transparency, and pure excitement drive everything we do. Our cutting-edge platform offers unparalleled grading, authentication, secure vaulting, and digital pack openings (Slab Packs ®), giving collectors the power to curate unique online showrooms and redefine their collecting experience.

About the Role

We're hiring our first Engineering Manager — a foundational leadership role that will shape how we build for years to come. Partnering directly with our CTO, you'll manage our engineering organization, bringing the operational structure, systems, and processes needed to scale a high-performing team to the next level. This is a rare opportunity to define how a thriving org operates at a company with real traction, significant backing, and the ambition to redefine an entire industry.

What You'll Do

• People Management & Mentorship: Own the health and growth of a 40+ person engineering team. Run effective 1:1s, build career development frameworks, and drive performance management that elevates talent while retaining your best people.
• Operational Excellence: Design and implement our "Engineering Operating System" — the playbook that governs how we plan, build, ship, and learn. You'll refine sprint cadences, elevate documentation standards, and optimize our SDLC for high-quality, predictable delivery without sacrificing speed.
• AI Strategy & Integration: Champion the adoption of AI tools and best practices across engineering. Ensure teams are effectively leveraging tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and agentic orchestration platforms in alignment with company standards — and continuously raise the bar as the tooling landscape evolves.
• Roadmap Partnership: Work hand-in-hand with the CTO, Product, Design, and senior leadership to translate business priorities into clear technical milestones — ensuring the team is always focused on the work that moves the needle most.
• Technical Recruiting: Partner with Talent Acquisition and leadership to build a hiring engine and pipelines to consistently hire top talent. Set the interview bar and help scale the team while strengthening Arena Club's technical brand.
• Architectural Oversight: You won't be writing code daily, but you'll stay close to the work — participating in design reviews and technical decisions to ensure our systems remain scalable, secure, and maintainable as we grow.
• Culture Carrier: Set the tone for a high-agency, transparent, and inclusive engineering culture that embodies the Arena Club Standard — where ownership isn't a buzzword, it's the baseline.

Who You Are

You've built engineering organizations from the inside out — not just managing teams, but fundamentally reshaping how they operate, ship, and scale. You know how to bring structure and rigor to a fast-moving org without killing the speed and scrappiness that make startups special. You're obsessed with developer productivity, energized by the AI-assisted development frontier, and you lead with the kind of high EQ that earns trust across every level of the org.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience); Master’s degree preferred.
• 12+ years of software engineering experience with 4+ years in a dedicated engineering management role.
• Proven track record managing or overseeing large engineering organizations (20+ engineers) through periods of significant growth.
• Strong technical foundation in modern tech stacks, distributed systems, and CI/CD — enough to drive architectural discussions with credibility and conviction.
• Hands-on experience implementing AI/LLM developer tools (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Cody) to accelerate engineering output.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience as a founding or first Engineering Manager hire, or scaling an org to 100+ engineers.
• Background in marketplace, e-commerce, gaming, or data-intensive consumer facing tech.

Location Requirements

This role is onsite at our headquarters in Los Angeles, CA.

The Arena Club Standard

Life at Arena Club isn't for the faint of heart — and that's by design. We're building products and experiences the collectibles world has never seen. This is a proving ground. It demands your best every single day, because anything less means you're falling behind. From day one, you're in the game. Trusted to deliver, expected to own outcomes, and driven to raise the bar higher than you thought possible. We don't just execute — we innovate, compete, and win together. That's how real breakthroughs happen. If you want routine or predictability, you won't find it here. But if you're ambitious, relentless, and hungry to prove yourself on a team built to dominate — step into the arena. You'll discover growth and reward here, unlike anywhere else.