Engineering Manager

Retire the ERP Light exists to replace factory-era ERPs with software that feels alive. Our Smart Financial Platform gives modern, global companies superpowers—automated accounting, real-time reporting, and financial flows that move at the speed of the business. We build with our customers, ship fast, and obsess over craft. In a short time, Light has gone from idea to the operating core for leading companies like Lovable, Legora, and Keyshot. People don’t just use Light—they enjoy it. We’re an early team defining a new software category. Think engineers who love debits and credits, designers who care about reconciliation states, and operators who treat finance as a product. If you’re excited to modernize how the world runs money—one workflow at a time—you’re in the right place. Backed by world‑class investors and advised by industry titans, we’re building category‑defining products with the freedom to ship ambitiously and own outcomes. Come help us make Light the global default for next‑gen finance.

This Engineering Manager role involves leading one of our engineering teams: five to seven engineers building a core part of the Smart Financial Platform. You own the team’s health, its standards, and its delivery. This is a hands‑on leadership role. You stay close enough to the code to earn your engineers’ trust and make real technical calls, but your team’s output comes from them, not from you holding the keyboard. You’ll report to the Head of Engineering and work alongside a Product Manager who owns what gets built and why. Your job is to build a team that ships it well.

We run small, autonomous teams with a clear split: Product owns the commitment, engineering owns the delivery. You’re the person who turns a product commitment into something your team can actually ship, on a sensible timeline, at a quality bar you set and hold. You grow the people on your team, you keep the work humane, and you’re the first to know when something’s drifting, never the last.

What you’ll own:

• People growth: One‑to‑ones that build trust rather than collect status. Every engineer on your team has a growth focus you can name, and feedback that’s timely and specific, not saved up for a review cycle.
• Performance: You spot drift early and act while it’s still a small conversation. You hold people to a clear bar, you own probation calls honestly, and nobody’s performance is ever a surprise to your manager.
• Hiring and onboarding: You own the funnel for your team’s open roles, interview to a consistent bar, and own a new joiner’s first 90 days to productivity.
• Team health: Psychological safety, conflict caught early, on‑call and workload kept sustainable, and team working agreements that actually hold. You treat a quietly disengaging engineer like a production incident.
• Technical excellence: You stay fresh enough in the code to evaluate your team’s work independently. You review, you set the quality bar, you make the final call when the team deadlocks, and you unblock rather than take over.
• Delivery: You own delivery of the scope you and your PM have agreed, and you renegotiate early when reality changes rather than letting a deadline arrive broken.
• On coding: We expect our EMs to stay in the code. Reviews, pairing, unblocking, small fixes, off the critical path. It’s part of the job, not a reward for finishing the management work. What you won’t do is own a feature end to end, your leverage is the team, not your own commits.

Your qualifications could be:

• Experience managing a team of engineers, including the full people side: growth, feedback, performance, and hiring.
• A strong engineering background you haven’t walked away from. You can read a design, review a PR, and hold a technical line with senior engineers.
• A track record of shipping. You’ve owned delivery for a team and know how to break down ambiguous work and keep it moving.
• You’re genuinely AI‑native. You’ve changed how you and your team work because of AI tooling, and you have judgement about where it helps and where it misleads.
• Clear, direct communication. You give feedback well, you elevate early, and you represent your team honestly in both directions.

Bonus points:

• Experience in SaaS or FinTech, especially multi‑entity financial operations or global accounting.
• You’ve stood up or reshaped a team, not just inherited one.
• Experience with a Kotlin / React stack, or comfort getting fluent in it.

The good stuff:

• A competitive salary and potential stock options.
• 25 days of annual leave plus public holidays in the country where you are based.
• Regular socials and company off‑sites.
• A huge opportunity for career growth as you’ll help shape a market‑defining product.

The famous last words:

Working at Light means you’re embarking on an exciting journey to reshape the future of multinational financial operations. Our cheat‑code is that we’ve built something like this before – and are now doing it again, only better. Our goal is to make global finance effortless and empower companies to make informed decisions. Join the rocket ship while it’s taking off.