Senior Engineering Manager

Plentific is a property technology platform used by housing providers, local authorities, housing associations, asset managers, and contractors across the UK and Germany to manage repairs, maintenance, compliance, and contractor operations at scale. Our platform combines marketplace infrastructure, workflow software, automation, and operational analytics. It is designed for the complexity, volume, and regulatory demands of social housing, public sector property portfolios, and large residential operations. We are headquartered in London, with engineering and operations across the UK and Germany. We are growing the team to expand the platform's coverage across Europe and to integrate AI throughout the product and operating model. If you want to work on hard, real‑world problems in the world's largest asset class, we would like to hear from you.

The Role

We are hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead Plentific's product engineering organisation. You will manage the team leads of multiple engineering teams covering the core domains of our platform, with full accountability for the engineers across every discipline frontend, backend, mobile, and quality. You will report to the VP of Engineering. You bring deep technical knowledge and a strong appetite for learning especially around agentic AI and how it is reshaping the way software is built. Your hands‑on coding focuses on the engineering organisation itself: improving the agentic tooling, the SDD framework, and the developer experience that makes every engineer faster and better. You stay close to the codebase, contribute code where it unblocks progress or moves the agentic SDLC forward, and review pull requests in enough depth to assess code quality, the maturity of our agentic practice, and individual engineer performance. You are equally comfortable in a 1:1 with a struggling engineer, in a roadmap conversation with a product manager, and in a design review with a staff engineer. Plentific's agentic software development transformation is already under way and producing results. We need a leader who can keep the momentum, expand it across every team, and partner with our engineering guild to refine the spec‑driven development (SDD) framework, the agentic tooling, and the practices that have got us this far. You will help roll out SDD across the engineering organisation, drive adoption, and track the outcomes. Success looks like a team that is continuously getting stronger: accelerating delivery cadence against business commitments, rising engineering standards, and an agentic development practice that compounds month on month.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the product engineering organisation through its team leads, owning delivery, technical quality, and people outcomes across frontend, backend, mobile, and quality engineering.
• Contribute code that improves the agentic tooling, the SDD framework, or the developer experience that supports every team.
• Review pull requests in enough depth to assess code quality, the maturity of our agentic SDLC, and individual engineer performance.
• Set and enforce a high bar for engineering standards code review, testing, observability, and architectural review and hold every team to it.

Agentic and Spec‑Driven Development

• Champion agentic and spec‑driven development practices across every team.
• Roll out our SDD framework, drive adoption, track its impact on delivery throughput and engineering quality, and feed learnings back into the practice.
• Participate actively in Plentific's engineering guild, partnering with other technical leaders to improve the SDD framework and the agentic tooling the guild produces.
• Treat the framework and tooling as a product whose customers are the product managers, designers, and engineers running our product development.

Team Performance and Growth

• Recruit, close, and retain exceptional engineers.
• Set the bar high enough that every hire strengthens the team, and never compromise on quality to fill seats.
• Own and continuously improve our technical and behavioural interview methods.
• Design and iterate on live coding exercises, take‑home challenges, and structured assessments so we evaluate candidate skills accurately, fairly, and at hiring scale.
• Own performance management and career development across engineering.
• Define what good looks like, coach every engineer toward that standard, and help them exceed it.
• Give direct, honest feedback.
• Build and develop the team leads, growing them into stronger managers through coaching, feedback, and clear expectations.

Delivery and Partnership

• Partner with product managers to size and resource the roadmap accurately.
• Flag delivery risks early, make trade‑offs explicit, and own on‑time delivery against business commitments.
• Establish a clear operating rhythm across engineering planning, delivery review, and post‑mortem that gives engineers predictable cadence and the wider organisation visibility into progress.
• Translate technical context for non‑engineering stakeholders product, design, commercial, and the executive team and bring business context back into engineering decisions.
• Contribute to engineering‑wide initiatives alongside other engineering leaders, on topics from career frameworks to platform investment to cross‑team standards.

Requirements

• Demonstrable track record managing engineering managers and team leads across multiple teams, with full ownership of delivery and people outcomes.
• Deep technical knowledge across modern software engineering, with the credibility to make architecture calls and the hands‑on coding ability to contribute meaningfully when it improves the developer experience, the agentic SDLC, or unblocks teams.
• Working fluency in Python and TypeScript, with practical production experience in both.
• Practical experience integrating, evaluating, or productionising machine learning systems not necessarily as a researcher, but as someone who has shipped ML‑powered features.
• Active, current hands‑on experience with agentic development tools: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent used as a daily part of your own engineering practice.
• Deep curiosity about how AI is reshaping software engineering, with a habit of staying ahead of new tooling and practices and bringing the best of them back to the team.
• Track record of recruiting, closing, and retaining senior engineers and engineering managers, with a high‑bar hiring philosophy.
• Track record of designing and improving technical interview methods live coding, take‑home challenges, structured behavioural interviews that assess candidate skills accurately at hiring scale.
• Demonstrable experience addressing under‑performance directly setting expectations early, coaching engineers to improve, and giving honest, timely feedback so nothing is a surprise.
• Commercial pragmatism: you optimise for the business outcome, you can explain trade‑offs to product and executive stakeholders without losing engineering credibility, and you are not afraid to make decisions that are right for the business but unpopular in the moment.

Experience and Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, of which at least 4 years in engineering management.
• 2+ years managing other engineering managers or team leads across multiple teams.
• Experience working in cross‑functional product engineering teams alongside product managers, designers, and data scientists.
• London‑based, with the ability to work from our London office on a hybrid basis (typically two to three days per week, adjusted to team rhythm).
• Bonus: domain experience in any of marketplace or two‑sided platforms (on‑demand services, field services, logistics, gig economy), B2B fintech and payments, vertical SaaS for operations‑heavy or compliance‑driven industries (construction, supply chain, insurance), or workflow and project‑management tooling.

Benefits

• A competitive compensation package.
• 25 days annual holiday + 1 additional day for every year served up to 3 years.
• Flexible working environment including the option to work abroad.
• Private health care for you and immediate family members with discounted gym membership, optical, dental and private GP.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• Life insurance (4x salary).
• Employee assistance program.
• Company volunteering day and charity salary sacrifice scheme.
• Learning management system powered by Udemy.
• Referral bonus and charity donation if someone you introduce joins the company.
• Season ticket loan, Cycle to work, Electric vehicle and Techscheme programs.
• Pension scheme.
• Work abroad scheme.
• Company‑sponsored lunches, dinners and social gatherings.
• Fully stocked kitchen with drinks, snacks, fruit, breakfast cereal etc.