Senior Engineering Manager | Voice in London

Meet DeepL. DeepL is a global AI product and research company focused on building secure, intelligent solutions to complex business problems. Over 200,000 business customers and millions of individuals across 228 global markets today trust DeepL's Language AI platform for human-like translation, improved writing and real-time voice translation. Founded in 2017 by CEO Jaroslaw “Jarek” Kutylowski, DeepL now has around 1,000 passionate employees and is supported by world-renowned investors including Benchmark, IVP, and Index Ventures. Our goal is to become the global leader in trusted, intelligent AI technology, building products that drive better communication, foster connections, and create a meaningful impact. To achieve this, we need talented people like you to join our journey.

What sets us apart is our blend of cutting-edge AI technology, meaningful work, and a culture where people truly thrive. We’re a team of innovators, researchers, and creators driven by a shared purpose to unlock human potential by making work simpler, smarter, and more connected. When we share what it’s like to work at DeepL, the reactions are overwhelmingly positive. This might be because of our technology that helps millions of people and businesses communicate and work better every day, or because of the trust, curiosity, and care that shape our culture. What we know for sure is this: being part of DeepL means joining a team dedicated to innovation, growth, and well-being.

Voice for Meetings builds DeepL's real time AI voice technology for professional collaboration. The team works on in call transcription, translation, and voice intelligence, delivered live across the meeting platforms people already use every day. The engineering problems are genuinely hard. Everything happens in real time, latency is measured in milliseconds, and quality is immediately visible to the person on the call. The team sits close to our applied science colleagues, so engineering and research work side by side rather than at arm's length. This is also one of the most consequential products at DeepL right now. Voice for Meetings sits on the critical path for the next phase of the company's growth, which means the work is visible, the decisions matter, and the team has real influence over where the product goes.

Your responsibilities:

• As Senior Engineering Manager for Voice for Meetings, you will lead the engineering team building DeepL's real time AI voice products. This is a hands on leadership role. You will be accountable for what the team builds and how well it works, and you will be close enough to the code to have a real opinion about it.
• Lead, develop, and grow a small team of senior engineers, owning hiring, performance, and career development.
• Drive end to end delivery of real time voice features from architecture through to production, holding a high bar for quality and pace at the same time.
• Own the technical direction for your team's systems. Stay close enough to the detail to challenge senior engineers credibly and to get into the code yourself when it helps.
• Work in a tight loop with your Principal Product Manager and senior technical lead, shaping what gets built rather than receiving a finished plan.
• Operate confidently at the boundary with applied science. Understand how inference, preprocessing, and training data drift affect the product, and translate between model realities and delivery commitments.
• Make and communicate clear technical trade offs under real constraints, including latency budgets, model quality, and timelines.
• Spot risks and gaps beyond your own remit and fix them properly, leaving the teams around you better off rather than just unblocking yourself.
• Build a high agency, low bureaucracy culture where engineers are trusted to make decisions and take genuine ownership of outcomes.

Qualities we look for:

• We care much more about how you think and what you have built than whether your background matches ours exactly.
• You have managed engineers directly and owned a team's delivery, performance, and development. You have hired people, grown them, and handled the difficult conversations as well as the good ones.
• You are a builder. You are comfortable in the trenches, you have real technical skills, and you have no interest in managing from a distance. If your hands on skills are a little rusty, that is fine, as long as you want to stay close to the work.
• You have led teams building product that users touch. Real time systems, streaming, distributed systems at scale, or similar. What matters is that technical depth was the substance of the work rather than a detail in the background.
• You have enough credibility to earn the confidence of senior engineers. You can reason about architecture, spot the failure modes, and add judgment to a technical decision rather than only facilitating it.
• You have a pragmatic working understanding of how ML systems behave in production. Inference, preprocessing, data drift, and what breaks when a model meets real users. You do not need to be an ML specialist.
• You think independently and act without waiting to be asked, and you draw those same instincts out of the people around you.
• You have strong product and commercial instinct. You frame engineering trade offs in terms of user and business outcomes.
• You are comfortable when the direction is still forming and priorities compete.

Nice to have:

• Experience with voice, speech, or audio technology, including ASR, TTS, or real time audio pipelines. A strong plus rather than a requirement, and we are genuinely open to engineering leaders from other technically demanding domains.
• You have grown into a senior remit inside one organisation rather than moving on each time the title was available.
• Experience building in a startup or a small product organisation, including something ambitious that did not work out.
• Experience integrating with third party platform APIs where you do not control the other side.
• Experience leading a team through a significant architectural change or technical pivot.

What we offer:

• Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities. We're more than just colleagues; we're a group of professionals with a shared mission to connect diverse cultures. Our global presence is growing–we've doubled in size nearly every year, with our employees based in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, the US, and Japan, and we continue to expand our network.
• Open communication, regular feedback: as a language-focused company, we value the importance of clear, honest communication. We value smooth collaboration, direct and actionable feedback, and believe that leading with empathy and growth mindset makes us better together.
• Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week. This allows you to engage directly with your team and experience the unique energy of our workspace, while still enjoying the flexibility and comfort of working from home. With flexible working hours and trust in your productivity, we are in sync with your team’s general locations and time zones to foster effective and seamless collaboration.
• Virtual Shares: An ownership mindset in every role. We believe everyone should share in our success, and that’s why every employee receives Virtual Shares, linking your contribution directly to DeepL’s growth and rewarding you with a stake in our future.
• Regular in-person team events: we bond over vibrant events that are as unique as our team, from local team and business unit gatherings, to new-joiner onboardings, to company-wide events that bring us all together–literally.
• Monthly full-day hacking sessions: every month, we have Hack Fridays, where you can spend your time diving into a project you're passionate about and get the opportunity to work with other teams–we value your initiatives, impact, and creativity.
• 30 days of annual leave: we value your peace of mind. With 30 days off (excluding public holidays) and access to mental health resources, we make sure you're as strong mentally as you are professionally.
• Competitive benefits: just as our team spans the globe, so does our benefits package. We've crafted it to reflect the diversity of our team and tailored it to align with your unique location, to ensure you feel supported every step of the way.

We are an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at DeepL for who you are - we appreciate authenticity here. Our product is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all succeed, contribute, and think forward! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our diversity that we will find the power to break down language barriers in the world.