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JD — Engineering Manager

Owner Classification Review Date Status
People Operations Internal April 2027 Active

Job Description: Engineering Manager

Department: Technology & Digital
Reports to: Head of Engineering / Acting CTO

Role Overview

Simpaisa's squads are cross-functional delivery teams. The Engineering Manager is the people manager for the engineers within one or more squads — responsible for the performance, development, and wellbeing of a team of 6–12 engineers across Solution Engineers, Tech Leads, and senior individual contributors.

This is the management track at G6 in the Simpaisa grade framework. It is distinct from the Tech Lead (who owns technical execution within a sprint) and the Chapter Lead (who owns technical standards and craft across squads). The Engineering Manager owns the human side: career development, performance, hiring, retention, and the conditions under which engineers do their best work.

Engineering Managers at Simpaisa are expected to remain technically credible — able to participate meaningfully in technical discussions, understand the complexity of what their teams are building, and make informed judgements about technical risk and effort. This is not a purely administrative role.

Key Responsibilities

  • Manage performance for a team of engineers: set clear goals aligned to squad OKRs and the CDO 30/60/90 plan, provide regular structured feedback, and conduct formal performance reviews.

  • Own career development for your engineers: understand their aspirations, create development plans, identify growth opportunities (new squad rotation, conference, stretch assignment), and manage grade progression within the G1–G8 framework.

  • Hire: own the end-to-end hiring process for engineers in your team — job descriptions, interview design, candidate evaluation, and offer decisions. Hiring is one of the highest-leverage activities in this role.

  • Retain: understand why good engineers leave and proactively address the conditions that cause it. Compensation, autonomy, growth, management quality — you own all of these.

  • Foster a high-performing, psychologically safe team environment — a place where engineers can raise technical concerns, challenge decisions, and make mistakes without fear of blame.

  • Work with Tech Leads to ensure the team has what it needs to deliver: clear requirements, unblocked dependencies, right-sized capacity.

  • Resolve escalated interpersonal or performance issues — constructively, promptly, and in line with Simpaisa's HR policies.

  • Represent the team in the Engineering Leadership Sync: bring visibility to capacity constraints, team health issues, and cross-squad blockers.

  • Support the Chapter Lead system: ensure your engineers are engaging with their Chapter, attending sessions, and applying Chapter standards in their squad work.

Required Skills and Experience

  • People management: Demonstrated experience leading and managing engineering teams — performance management, career development, and hiring. Not project management; people management.

  • Technical credibility: Enough technical depth to have meaningful conversations with senior engineers about architecture, delivery risk, and technical tradeoffs. Does not need to be the best engineer in the room — needs to be someone engineers respect.

  • Hiring: Experience designing and running structured technical hiring processes. Strong track record of hiring engineers who performed well.

  • Feedback discipline: Comfortable giving direct, honest feedback — including critical feedback. Does not avoid difficult conversations.

  • Agile delivery: Understanding of the squad model and 9-day cycle cadence. Ability to work alongside Tech Leads without undermining their technical authority.

  • Payments/fintech (preferred): Experience managing engineers in a regulated financial services or complex integration environment is a strong advantage.

  • Communication: Strong written and verbal communication — able to represent team interests upward and translate organisational direction downward clearly.

General Requirements

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business Administration, or a related field.

  • 5+ years of experience in engineering, with at least 2 years in a team lead or management role.

  • Demonstrated track record of building and managing effective engineering teams.

What We Offer

  • Competitive salary benchmarked to your local market.

  • Management responsibility that matters — engineers at Simpaisa build systems that move money for millions of people.

  • Clear management career path: Engineering Manager → Senior EM → Head of Engineering.

  • Dual-track career structure available — transition back to IC track is supported if preferred.

  • Flexible hybrid working.