SolarSquare Energy - Engineering Manager

What You'll Own : Team & Culture : - Build, hire, and develop a high-performing full-stack engineering team including setting the bar for what "high-performing" means at SolarSquare. - Create genuine career growth paths for engineers. - Maintain team health, retention, and motivation through periods of rapid change and ambiguity. Technical Strategy : - Define and drive the architectural roadmap. - Make and own technical bets : when to invest in platform, when to ship fast, when to pay down debt. - Establish observability, reliability, and security standards before they become production fires. Delivery : - Translate business goals into engineering priorities and push back when the translation is wrong. - Set clear goals, metrics, and delivery expectations; hold yourself and the team accountable to them. - Manage trade-offs between short-term product velocity and long-term engineering health. Cross-Functional Influence : - Partner with Product, Design, and Business stakeholders and influence decisions upstream. - Communicate technical risk, cost, and complexity clearly to non-technical leadership. What We're Looking For : - 7-10 years of engineering experience, with at least 3 years leading teams. - Strong understanding of distributed systems design : idempotency, retries, DLQs, circuit breakers, eventual consistency, you've had to debug these in production. - Proven experience with event-driven architecture and Kafka including schema design, consumer group management, and failure recovery patterns. - Comfort with relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis) databases including query optimisation and schema design decisions at scale. - You've designed or operated systems handling meaningful traffic ideally 10K+ RPS, significant daily transaction volumes, or consumer-scale user bases (1M+ users). - You understand what 99.99% uptime actually costs to maintain and you've made the infrastructure and on-call decisions to back it. - You've written or enforced SLOs, SLAs, and incident management processes. - You've done a postmortem that changed something real about how the team operates. - Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure beyond just deploying services, cost optimisation, right-sizing, architecture decisions that meaningfully reduced spend. - Working knowledge of containerisation (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) enough to unblock your team. - CI/CD pipeline ownership you've built or significantly improved a pipeline. - Experience with observability tooling : Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, or equivalent and more importantly, a philosophy about what to instrument and why. - You've made the call between monolith and microservices and you can defend it with context. - You've managed technical debt consciously : triaged it, prioritised it, and made the case to stakeholders for when to pay it down. - You've navigated a hard conversation with a product or business stakeholder and changed the outcome. - Your engineers grow under you. You can point to people you've promoted, coached, or unblocked. - You know how to build alignment across functions where incentives don't naturally align. - You have clear examples of decisions you made under ambiguity and you can articulate the trade-offs you weighed. - You've identified a systemic problem and fixed it without being asked. - You've built or rebuilt something that wasn't working a team, a process, a system.