Engineering Manager

Location: Office-based in London, UK (King’s Cross)

Contract: Full-time, Permanent

Salary: £180k to £280k+ (subject to experience) + Equity + Excellent Benefits

At PortSwigger, we choose to be in the office five days a week because we believe proximity accelerates clarity, trust, and high-quality decision-making. Our London office is not a satellite outpost; it’s a deliberate investment in building a durable engineering function that can deliver independently and attract exceptional people.

As an Engineering Manager for our London-based engineers, you’ll lead a group building the systems, tooling, and services that unlock new features in our products - enabling change in how they are designed, built, and shipped. Your team will focus on high-leverage engineering work: delivering capabilities, tooling, and shared systems, where it can have the greatest impact. You’ll work closely with a Product Manager as a true partner in shaping what the team builds, why it matters, and how success is measured.

This is an opportunity to:

• Shape a new team in a new location
• Build the platforms and features that power our core product suite - unlock new use cases for our global customer base
• Build the systems that enable AI-driven and collaborative work at scale for our users
• Act as a cultural and operational anchor for a growing London office

PortSwigger is profitable, majority founder-owned, and investing for the long term. That gives us the freedom to build deliberately — no growth-at-all-costs theatre, no exit clock driving short-term decisions. We’re building infrastructure that compounds. We work together by default. The people who join now will define how this team operates, what “good” looks like, and how the office feels day to day.

What You’ll Do

• Lead a Diverse Team of Engineers
• Build and lead a team developing systems, tooling, and capabilities that improve how products are built and delivered
• Define and evolve the team charter including its Team API and service boundaries
• Treat internal engineering teams as customers: understand their needs, measure adoption, improve DevEx
• Partner closely with Product Managers to define what to build, why it matters, and how success is measured
• Balance immediate delivery needs with longer-term investment in systems, tooling, and engineering effectiveness, avoiding both underinvestment and over-engineering
• Establish clear success metrics (e.g., DORA, adoption, time-to-first-deploy, reduction in friction, delivery enablement)

Build a High-Performing, Durable Team

• Hire and grow engineers with complementary strengths
• Partner closely with a Tech Lead to align technical direction and team health
• Coach engineers toward autonomy and shared ownership of delivery health
• Embed sustainable working rhythms: no heroics, no burnout cycles, just sustainable quality delivery
• Develop future leaders and raise the engineering bar in London

Improve the Engineering System

• Reduce cross-team friction and coordination overhead
• Work closely with Product and other EMs to calibrate investment trade-offs
• Partner with a Product Manager as a true counterpart, jointly shaping priorities, trade-offs, and roadmap for the team
• Bring evidence into decision-making (adoption data, DORA signals, qualitative feedback)

Act as a London Office Leader

• Alongside leading your team, you will play a visible role in shaping the London office. This includes:
• Acting as a steward of PortSwigger culture locally
• Role-modelling our standards around quality, candour, and collaboration
• Helping ensure the office runs smoothly day-to-day, escalating issues appropriately
• Feeding back local signals to HQ so alignment stays strong
• Enabling London engineers to feel ownership over how the office evolves

What Success Looks Like

Within 3 months, we would expect:

• A clearly defined and evolving team charter, with a well-understood role within the wider engineering organisation
• Strong partnership with Product and other engineering teams with clear ownership of priorities, trade-offs and outcomes
• Early evidence of impact, whether through adoption of what the team builds, improved developer workflows or reduced delivery friction

Within 6 months, we would expect:

• A cohesive, high-performing team in London with strong engineering standards, ways of working, and a clear identity
• The team reliably delivering high-leverage work, including systems, tooling or shared capabilities that measurably improves how products are built, tested or shipped
• London established as a credible and durable engineering location with real delivery ownership and momentum

About You

We’re looking for an EM who sees high-leverage engineering work as a force multiplier, not overhead.

Platform/Complicated-Sub System Mindset

• You have built internal platforms or subsystem capabilities used by multiple engineering teams
• You think of internal engineers as customers, not ticket submitters
• You track through adoption, developer experience, and time-to-value not just output
• You know that adoption must be earned; “build it and they will come” is not a strategy
• You balance simplicity and durability, avoid over-engineering and building for reuse
• You reduce friction, abstract complexity, and unblock delivery for others

Technical Credibility

• Strong grounding in CI/CD, infrastructure, observability, and delivery systems
• Comfortable discussing architecture trade-offs and platform economics
• Able to evaluate build vs buy decisions pragmatically
• You don’t need to be the deepest expert in the room but you must be able to challenge and guide credibly

Engineering Leadership Craft

• You have 8+ years industry experience with at least 3 years leading engineers
• You’ve hired and developed engineers directly
• You coach rather than command building teams that own outcomes
• You have managed underperformance directly and fairly
• You have operated in a true PM–EM partnership, jointly owning priorities, trade-offs, and outcomes rather than executing a handed-down backlog
• You’re able to work effectively with a Tech Lead, building trust in their technical ability while pushing back where decisions impact delivery

Systems Thinker

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity
• Prefer small, reversible experiments to large, brittle transformations
• Think beyond your team boundary and optimise for the whole engineering ecosystem
• Can articulate not just what your team delivered but what changed because of it

Personal Attributes

• High integrity and directness
• Calm under pressure
• Energised by growing others
• Motivated by long-term impact rather than short-term optics
• Curious about how AI can improve developer workflows and internal tooling

Why Join PortSwigger?

PortSwigger is a place to do the best work of your career and be yourself while doing it. We combine high expectations with high support, creating a culture where deep thinkers and collaborative builders who share early and invite input can thrive. We believe in rewarding people generously and offer excellent salaries, based on individual skills and contributions.

Purpose and Culture

• A product with global reach and purpose (Burp Suite helps the world to secure the web)
• A culture of radical candour, autonomy, and continuous learning
• A supportive environment designed to help you grow and do meaningful work
• Real ownership and a voice in what gets built and how
• We foster an inclusive and high-performance culture with a focus on work-life balance
• You’ll be part of a humble, supportive, and fun team that values collaboration, humour, and a strong sense of belonging

Financial and Well-being Benefits

• 8% employer pension contribution
• Share options (discretionary)
• Private medical insurance, provided through Bupa with same day virtual GP appointments
• Life assurance: 4x salary
• Income protection: full pay for first 6 months of incapacity followed by 75% of salary plus pension contribution
• 36 days paid time off: 33 days annual leave (including public holidays) + 3 company-wide recharge days (decided annually), with the ability to buy and sell additional holidays
• Regular team events, including memorable summer and winter parties
• Our working hours are flexible, with core hours from 9am to 4pm

Ready to Apply?

We care more about leadership mindset, platform thinking, and long-term intent than a perfectly polished CV. If you’re excited by:

• Building a high-impact engineering team from first principles
• Shaping a growing London engineering function
• Treating internal capability as a product
• Leading with clarity, ownership, and care

We’d love to hear from you. Not sure you tick every box? Apply anyway. The best EMs are rarely linear.