Engineering Manager

Location: Very flexible - we’re happy for folks to work WFH and lots of us do. We only ask that you come into our London office a couple of times a month for team strategy days and socials - but of course, you're more than welcome to come in as much as you like! (+ we're working a 4 day work week - Fridays off!)

Contract: Permanent

Salary: £94,000 - £110,000 + benefits listed below

About Cuvva: We're on a mission to give everyone affordable access to a car anytime, anywhere. We offer short-term car insurance through our world-class app, creating truly flexible products that meet people’s real needs. Using lightning-fast technology to unlock better experiences and fairer prices for our customers, Cuvva is building the future of insurance every day. Cuvva was the first to sell hourly insurance via an app in the UK back in 2016. And we haven’t stopped innovating since. We’ve sold over 14 million policies, and supported over 1.5 million drivers and we’re just getting started. We’re a team of 100 people, passionate about solving our customers’ problems. Join us.

About the role: As we continue to grow, we’re investing more intentionally in Engineering leadership. We’re looking for an Engineering Manager who can bring technical credibility, delivery focus and thoughtful people leadership into one of our cross-functional product teams. You’ll work very closely with a dedicated Product Manager, playing an active role in shaping work from the earliest stages. This isn’t a handover model, you’ll help validate ideas, challenge assumptions and ensure what we’re building is both technically sound and commercially meaningful. This is an especially exciting role for someone who enjoys being close to the detail. You’ll support engineers through technical decision-making, help the team navigate trade-offs with confidence, and step in when needed to unblock or move things forward. You’ll create the conditions for people to grow and perform at their best, while ensuring the team delivers real impact.

At Cuvva, Engineering Managers are aligned and measured against three core pillars:

• Technical depth (non-negotiable): You won’t be coding day-to-day, but you’ll be deeply technical. You’ll dive into codebases when needed to properly understand problems and unblock the team, challenge technical decisions, approaches, and trade-offs with confidence, support engineers in thinking through complexity, not just executing tasks, contribute to shaping solutions, not just reviewing them, and bring credibility through your own experience as a software engineer (ideally backend or full stack).
• Delivery ownership (not project management): You are accountable for how and when your team delivers. You’ll work closely with your Product Manager to shape work that is valuable, feasible, and commercially sound, help validate product ideas from a technical perspective early, before they reach delivery, challenge estimations and assumptions with context and experience, help your team identify and navigate trade-offs (speed vs quality, scope vs impact, short-term vs long-term), and ensure the team is set up to deliver effectively, consistently and sustainably.
• People leadership (high EQ, high standards): You’ll be a proactive, thoughtful people manager. You’ll create a psychologically safe, high-performing team environment, invest in your engineers’ growth through coaching, feedback and mentorship, spot issues early (burnout, disengagement, performance) and act on them, and take a genuine interest in helping people progress in their careers.

On a day-to-day basis you’ll:

• Build trust with stakeholders through clear and open communication, proactively sharing progress, surfacing risks early and bringing people along in decision-making.
• Partner closely with your Product Manager to shape, validate and prioritise work.
• Support your team in making strong technical decisions, offering guidance and challenge where needed.
• Step in to unblock work when needed, whether that’s through technical input or reframing the problem.
• Facilitate planning, ensuring work is well-scoped, understood and achievable.
• Identify risks, bottlenecks and trade-offs early while helping your team to navigate them.
• Hold regular 1:1s, offering coaching, feedback and career development support.
• Improve how your team operates, technically, operationally and culturally.
• Collaborate with other Engineering Managers to raise the bar across the organisation.
• Maintain visibility of your team’s work, progress and challenges across the business.
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding and building a strong engineering culture.

You’ll do great here if you:

• Are able to communicate trade-offs and decisions clearly, building trust within Engineering, Product and with key stakeholders across the business, knowing when to push back or influence, when to align and when to escalate.
• Have a strong background as a software engineer (backend or full stack ideally), and still think in a technical, hands-on way.
• Have experience as an Engineering Manager, or are a Tech Lead / Principal Engineer who has taken on people management responsibilities.
• Are proactive in working closely with Product and can contribute to shaping solutions, not just delivering them.
• Can think beyond your team, understanding how technical decisions impact customers, business outcomes and long-term scalability.
• Are comfortable challenging engineers constructively, using your own experience to guide better outcomes.
• Care about delivery and outcomes, not just activity, you can help teams make the right trade-offs.
• Are a thoughtful, proactive people manager who invests in their team’s growth and wellbeing.
• Enjoy working in cross-functional product teams in a lean, fast-moving environment.
• Have a mindset of continuous improvement, always looking to raise the bar.
• Are comfortable asking not just ‘can we build this?’ but ‘should we build this, and what’s the right way to do it?’

It’s a bonus if you:

• Have worked in regulated environments (e.g. finTech, InsureTech or insurance, etc.).
• Have contributed to engineering culture, standards or strategy beyond your immediate team.

Our Product Engineering teams: At Cuvva, we run lean, highly collaborative cross-functional teams. Each team owns its area of the product end-to-end, with real autonomy and accountability. You’ll be joining an established Engineering Manager community, where ideas are shared openly, challenges are discussed honestly, and there’s a strong focus on continuously improving how we lead and deliver. While you’ll have clear ownership of your immediate team, you won’t operate in isolation. Our engineers work across shared systems and codebases, so decisions in one team can have a real impact on others. Alongside delivering product initiatives, you’ll also be expected to contribute to the wider engineering discipline, improving standards, shaping ways of working, and supporting engineering-wide initiatives that raise the bar across the organisation. You’ll also need to take a broader view of planning and resourcing, recognising that squad needs are not always isolated. That means working closely with other Engineering Managers and leadership to think through shared priorities, dependencies, team capacity, and where engineering resources can have the biggest impact. We’re looking for someone who can zoom in and out with ease, caring deeply about their team, while also making thoughtful decisions that support the wider engineering organisation.

Our 2026 Engineering Strategy: We’re not just here to write code, we’re here to redefine how insurance works. Our 2026 engineering strategy is built on five principles:

• AI-first: We’re investing in automation and building AI-powered features to serve customers better and faster.
• Proactive mindset: We take initiative, spot problems early, and act fast.
• Data-driven decisions: Hypotheses are tested. Gut feel isn’t good enough.
• Pareto principle: Get 80% of the value with 20% of the effort, polish only when it matters.
• Testing-first mindset: Stability matters. We test, we ship, we learn.

The hiring process:

• Initial chat with People Team (60m).
• Deep Dive + technical session with Head of Engineering & team (90m).
• Key stakeholder review with CTO (45m).
• Founders chat with our CEO, Freddy (30m).

Benefits: As well as a competitive salary (£94,000 - £110,000 depending on experience), benefits of working at Cuvva include:

• Very flexible WFH set up, we only ask folks to come in a couple of times a month for team strategy days and socials - but of course, you're more than welcome to come in as much as you like!
• A four day work week (Fridays off!).
• Transparent salary model and bands for all roles (without sharing anyone's individual salary of course!).
• 20.5 days of holiday a year + public holidays - rising with each year at Cuvva.
• Quarterly team socials and company events.
• Private medical insurance with Bupa.
• Professional development budget.
• Health, WFH and wellbeing budget.
• Increases to all allowances year on year.
• Enhanced parental leave and pay.
• Cycle to work scheme.
• Mental Health and Coaching Support - We offer free and confidential access to comprehensive mental healthcare and coaching through Oliva.
• Hundreds of perks and discounts with Perkbox.
• £100 a month towards your Cuvva car insurance.
• Referral bonus when you bring your friends to join the Cuvva team.

Cuvva ways of working: We’re dedicated to creating a place where people want to work, a place where people believe in what they’re doing, have clear expectations and a bunch of freedom. Our approach to hybrid working is very flexible: we only ask people to come a couple of times a month for team building or company events. The rest of time it’s up to you where and how you work. You can of course come into the office as much as you like!