Engineering Manager - Events in London

About Us

Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is the intelligent platform for travel and spend management. Built to tackle the time‑consuming, manual work that gets in the way of real work, our tools automate everything from travel bookings to expenses, invoice processing, and more. By eliminating this shadow work that wastes hours, erodes morale, and saps innovation, we’re on a mission to power real work, with real impact. We’re trusted by more than 10,000 companies worldwide, including Wise, On Running, Breitling, and Fabletics, and we’re tackling the 7 hours of lost productivity per employee each week, a $1.7 trillion problem.

As an Engineering Manager for the Perk Events team, you'll lead a distributed group of experienced engineers responsible for building and evolving the core group booking and events platform within Perk. You'll manage a team of engineers located in the Barcelona hub, partnering closely with the squad lead, product, and design to deliver complex, high‑impact initiatives in a fast‑moving environment. The team is currently executing on several urgent strategic bets — including an AI‑powered event planner — requiring strong technical leadership, thoughtful prioritization, and the ability to help teams execute effectively while maintaining engineering quality.

In this role, you'll help shape the technical direction of the platform, support the team in navigating a highly specialized domain while also contributing individually to the codebase and spearheading initiatives. While deep domain expertise in travel tech or MICE is not a strict requirement, experience working within complex transactional systems with multiple external integrations is highly valued. Through strong people leadership, technical judgment, and operational excellence, you'll help scale a seamless events booking experience for customers across Europe & US.

As an Engineering Manager, you will:

• Be accountable for the delivery and personal development of your team(s).
• Act as a servant leader to your engineers and adapt your leadership style to the needs of the situation.
• Take care of individuals' performance in the organisation and support their journey and ownership of their career using coaching and mentoring where appropriate.
• Act as a technical champion, ensuring that the team has the time and context to build systems that meet the needs and standards of our organisation.
• Enable fluent and effective collaboration within the team, and support them through challenges in system architecture, design or implementation.
• Develop and evolve a long‑term strategy and roadmap for the team, working with the Product Manager and aligned with the Tribe mission.
• Strategic team building and planning for delivering highly available features that scale with our growth.
• Be a key part of the recruitment and growth of the engineering team.
• Work with the business and team metrics to deliver a 7‑star experience to our customers.
• Have an understanding of how engineering impacts product and business needs.
• Provide feedback to stakeholders within Builders (Product and Eng) and sometimes the wider business.

AI at Perk

AI is embedded in how we work and what we build. On the engineering side, it spans the whole workflow: our Notion, Jira, GitHub and Slack are AI‑connected so you get up to speed fast, and day‑to‑day it helps with specifying features, writing and reviewing code, and automated AI PR review on every pull request. When something goes wrong in production, AI surfaces context across systems quickly. We also embrace agentic coding, using AI as an active collaborator, not just a prompt‑by‑prompt co‑pilot.

We expect candidates to use AI tools in our coding interviews. The bar is understanding your code and owning what you produce. That reflects how we work every day.

Required skills and experience:

• You have around 5‑8 years of experience managing software engineers.
• For this role, we’re looking for someone who has managed (and will continue to) around 8‑10 software engineers.
• You come from a technical background - ideally in software engineering, where you were a hands‑on IC.
• You are a people manager who builds an effective work culture that improves the working lives of your team.
• You have experience managing larger teams where it’s necessary to build processes and systems of delegation to get work done.
• You act as a problem finder and solver technically and organisationally, helping the team to overcome any issue that prevents your engineering fellows from performing at their best.
• You run effective performance reviews that celebrate achievements and help your team identify where to grow next in line with their aspirations and the needs of the business.
• Pragmatism and obsession for simplicity, efficiency, and performance.
• You have the ability to adapt and react fast to an ever‑changing environment.
• Managing AI‑Driven Development: Experience with—or a strong interest in—modern AI‑augmented workflows. This includes driving your team to leverage agentic workflows, develop custom agentic skills to extend AI capabilities.

How We Work

At Perk, we take an IRL‑first approach to work, where our team works together in‑person 3 days a week. As such, this role requires you to be based within commuting distance of our hubs. We fundamentally believe in the value of meeting in real life to improve connectivity, productivity, creativity and ultimately making us a great place to work.

For certain roles, we can help with relocation from anywhere in the world, English is the official language at the office. Please submit your resume in English if you choose to apply. Do not forget to submit an updated portfolio and/or resume.

Perk is a global company with a diverse customer base, and we want to make sure the people behind our product reflect that. We’re an equal opportunity employer, which means you’re welcome at Perk regardless of how you look, where you’re from, or anything else that makes you, well, you.

Protect Yourself from Recruitment Scams

All official communication from Perk will always come from email addresses ending in @perk.com or @externalperk.com, our verified social media channels, or recruiters listed on our official LinkedIn page. We will never ask you to pay for equipment, training, or fees, request sensitive personal information such as bank details early in the process, or communicate through unofficial apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. If you receive a message claiming to be from Perk that seems suspicious, please do not respond. Forward it to security at perk.com, and we will confirm whether it is legitimate.