Senior Engineering Manager in London

Fonoa is the Tax Operating System for autonomous tax. AI that tracks every rule, acts on every obligation, and proves every decision, built on modular infrastructure. Fonoa’s modules cover the full indirect tax lifecycle: tax ID validation, real-time tax determination, e-invoicing, and returns. All on one shared data model and integration, with one audit trail. Each added capability makes the others stronger. Agents monitor obligations, populate returns, catch anomalies and assemble audit packs in seconds. The system does the work. Humans make the calls. That’s autonomous tax.

We operate across 120+ countries, with clients going live in weeks, if not days. Trusted by Canva, Netflix, Spotify, Uber, Zoom and Booking.com. Rated 4.5/5 stars and a High Performer on G2 and 4.6/5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights.

About Engineering at Fonoa

Engineering is central to how we build the business. We focus on solving real customer problems, not just shipping features. We work in small, high-trust teams, with full ownership across the lifecycle, from design to production and beyond.

• Ownership – engineers own what they build end-to-end
• Simplicity – we break down complex problems into clear solutions
• Thinking Big - we innovate with modern technologies (LLMs, AI Agents, etc.) to solve meaningful problems
• Quality – scalable, maintainable systems are non-negotiable
• Speed & iteration – we ship fast, learn, and improve continuously
• Collaboration – we win as a team, not as individuals

Position Overview

As Fonoa continues to scale globally, we are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a product engineering team that builds scalable systems and delivers meaningful customer impact. This is a leadership role sitting at the intersection of engineering, product, people, and execution. You will work closely with Product Managers, engineers, and leadership to align technical delivery with business priorities, while creating an environment where teams can move quickly, make good decisions, and continuously improve.

This is not a role focused on process for the sake of process. We are looking for someone who combines strong engineering judgment with pragmatism, product thinking, and a deep focus on people and team health. Someone who enjoys building teams, simplifying execution, and helping engineers grow while delivering high-quality systems at scale.

You will be responsible for shaping how your team operates day-to-day, from planning and execution to hiring, mentoring, and long-term team development. At the same time, you will contribute to the broader engineering organisation by collaborating with engineering leadership on engineering culture, technical direction, and organisational effectiveness.

We are looking for someone who thrives in fast-moving environments, is comfortable with ambiguity and change, and is excited about building products and teams in a high-growth company.

What You Will Do

• Learn about how painful it is for companies to manually handle the tax lifecycle, and think about how our systems change the status quo.
• Run a product engineering team, aligning business objectives with technical delivery.
• Partnering with the Product Manager, co-owning the product roadmap.
• Guiding on day-to-day tactical work, hiring, onboarding, developing and mentoring. Your success is your team’s success.
• Contribute to the broader engineering culture and goals by collaborating on high-level strategy with other Engineering Managers and our CTO.
• Continuously strive to build the best API product, leveraging the best experience and capabilities.

What We Are Looking For

• You are fully proficient in English. Written and spoken, as we are a bunch from around the world, but we work in English.
• You optimise for distributed and asynchronous work, favouring documenting and taking notes over having ad-hoc face-to-face meetings that leave no trace and exclude the people who were not around at the right time.
• You have a strong sense of ownership, you care about what you build, and you are building the right thing that serves your customers.
• You focus on people; you are able to hire the right people, distribute and organise, are able to develop your team through constant feedback, keep them healthy and focus on retention.
• You like to optimise processes to speed up product development without sacrificing quality.
• You’re a builder at heart. You enjoy the opportunity to have extensive exposure, making things work for a company in the long term, and having an entrepreneurial attitude towards anything that comes your way.
• You are either eager to learn or comfortable scaling and operating large-scale microservices in high-load and growth environments.
• You are knowledgeable in several languages. Most of our current codebase is in Go and Typescript.
• You enjoy removing unused features more than shipping new things that no one cares about. You run away from the success theatre.
• You ship small things fast, continuously, and iteratively, learning on each step.
• You like to use data over opinions to make decisions. And are okay with finding the data yourself when it’s missing.
• You are comfortable with change, whether it involves adjusting priorities, setting new goals, or meeting deadlines. You see this more as an opportunity than a hurdle. You are also comfortable with challenging the status quo and pushing for change.
• You’re looking to make a serious impact and are excited about working in a high-growth startup.

API Documentation

For engineers, API design and structure are an important part of evaluating a role. You can explore our API and how we build products here: https://docs.fonoa.com/

Tech Stack

We use these technologies today, but we don’t hire for specific tools. We care about engineers who can understand problems, make good technical decisions, and choose the right tools for the job.

• Backend: Node.js, Go
• Frontend: React, TypeScript
• Infrastructure: GCP, k8s, Terraform, Postgres

Note: If you don’t think you have the full experience we’re looking for, but you could be a fit and are willing to learn, do apply anyway! We are building a diverse and inclusive team.

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