Engineering Manager - Shopping Experience (Hiring Immediately) in London

About Lyst

Lyst is a global fashion shopping platform founded in London in 2010, catering to over 160M shoppers per year. We curate pieces from 27,000 of the world's leading brands and stores. In 2025, Lyst joined forces with Zozo, operators of Zozotown (Japan’s leading fashion e-commerce platform). This partnership marks a bold new era for Lyst as we accelerate our ambition to redefine the future of fashion shopping through AI, personalisation, and cutting-edge technology.

The Mission

We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to join our Shopping Experience squad. You will be a key leader in our mission to build the world’s most intelligent and seamless fashion shopping platform. In this role, you will operate as part of a leadership trio—partnering closely with Product and Design to shape strategy, drive execution, and deliver measurable business impact across Lyst’s Marketplace. This squad is at the forefront of the customer experience, building an efficient funnel for getting the customer to buy smoothly and showcasing the value of our partner fashion retailers. You will combine strategic technical leadership with a deep focus on operational excellence, predictable delivery, and, most importantly, the growth and wellbeing of your team.

Requirements

The Role: People, Process, & Tech

We believe that well-motivated, aligned, and thriving tech teams create the best business outcomes. You will focus on:

• Team Leadership: Build a high-performing, psychologically safe environment where engineers can do their best work. You are accountable for the hiring, retention, mentoring, and career growth of your engineers.
• Delivery Management: You own the “How” — ensuring strategy turns into predictable, high-quality delivery. You will ensure the team delivers value predictably using Agile methodologies, removing blockers, managing cross-team dependencies, contributing to code reviews, and pairing with engineers when needed. This is a hands-on role.
• Technical Strategy: While you may not be writing code daily, you will remain close to the metal. You will guide architectural decisions, uphold code quality standards, and ensure the team is tackling technical debt alongside feature work.
• Collaboration: You will act as a bridge between engineering and the wider business, translating complex technical concepts into clear, actionable insights for stakeholders across Marketing, Commercial, and Partnerships.

Within your first 3 months, you will:

• People: Build strong relationships with your direct reports, understand their motivations and career aspirations, and establish clear growth plans.
• Delivery: Evaluate existing agile practices and implement targeted improvements that increase predictability, quality, and team engagement.
• Strategy: Partner with Product and Engineering Leadership to shape a 6-month product and technical roadmap aligned with company priorities and measurable outcomes.
• Impact: Successfully deliver a high-impact initiative that improves the customer journey for our 160M+ annual users.

The Tech Stack & Culture

We work in a You build it, you ship it, you run it culture. We have a rapid delivery culture, supported by the following stack:

• Backend: Python (Django predominantly)
• Frontend: React / TypeScript / iOS (BFF pattern)
• Infrastructure: Fully Cloud-Native (AWS), CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
• Testing: Strong focus on BDD, Unit, and E2E testing.

What we are looking for:

• People-First Mindset: Proven experience managing and mentoring engineers. You know how to inspire teams, build a strong engineering culture, and drive meaningful performance conversations.
• Delivery Expertise: You balance people with structured and data-driven approaches. You know how to use Agile/Lean processes to make delivery painless and predictable. You are comfortable contributing across the stack and pairing with engineers to unblock, mentor, and raise the bar.
• Technical Expertise: You have a strong background in software engineering building web and/or app products and system design. You can decompose complex problems and guide a team toward pragmatic, scalable architectural solutions.
• Communication: You can explain technical risks to non-technical stakeholders and translate business goals into engineering tasks.
• Strategic Thinking: You can balance the immediate need to ship with the long-term health, reliability, and scalability of the platform.
• Experience in building high-scale consumer or e-commerce platforms is a strong plus.