Engineering Manager, Admin and CORE Platforms, Kanpla

Kanpla

13d • Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead two teams: Admin and CORE. The Admin team manages Kanpla's back office system, which is crucial for kitchen chefs and account managers to set up and run menus, pricing, orders, and configurations. The CORE team is responsible for the shared foundation, including the data model, core services, and ordering pipeline. This role is one of the first dedicated Engineering Manager positions at Kanpla, aimed at establishing a proper engineering management layer to support engineer growth, improve decision-making, and ensure scalability. The role involves people and capacity ownership, with approximately 20-30% of time dedicated to hands-on technical work, such as pairing and code reviews, but not critical path development. The Engineering Manager will partner with Product Managers and senior engineers on delivery, scoping, and quality, and will play a key role in defining and growing technical leadership on the individual contributor track, including shaping the company's career framework. This is an opportunity to build the engineering management function from the ground up in a growing scaleup environment.

Requirements

• Experience managing a team of engineers, including performance conversations, growth plans, and honest feedback.
• Genuine motivation for people management. You measure your work by what your team ships and how your engineers develop, not by your own commits.
• Technically credible with a hands-on engineering background, ideally in TypeScript/Node.js. You can review a design, challenge a plan, and contribute to a project definition.
• Comfortable operating without a playbook. We don't have a mature EM function, a finished career ladder, or a settled team topology. You'll help write all three.
• A track record of partnering closely with Product, and of pushing back well when scope and capacity don't match.
• Excellent communicator across a distributed team in several countries.
• Pragmatic, autonomous, low ego.
• Must be able to stay hands-on around 20–30% of your time: pairing, reviews, the occasional small piece of work. Never on the critical path.
• Should be able to read the code and hold a real design conversation.

Nice To Haves

• Experience establishing an EM function or management layer where there wasn't one before.
• Experience coaching senior engineers into technical leadership, and keeping the IC track a genuinely attractive option.
• Background with highly configurable, multi-tenant back-office or admin systems, with many integration points and configuration paths.
• Experience with GCP (Firestore, Cloud Run, or similar managed services).
• Experience in food service, retail, or another operationally complex industry.

Responsibilities

• Manage the engineers on Admin and CORE: regular one-on-ones, career growth plans, and direct, useful performance feedback.
• Own capacity and staffing across both teams: who's working on what, where we're thin, and what we do about it.
• Partner with the Product Managers on delivery, sequencing, and trade-offs, and with the senior engineers on scoping and quality.
• Partner with other EMs on cross-team initiatives and collaboration.
• Help define and grow technical leadership on the IC track.
• Hire. You'll shape and run hiring for your teams as we grow.
• Remove bottlenecks: fewer decisions routed upward, more teams that can run themselves.
• Help build our career framework.

Benefits

• Flexible hours
• Choice to work from Aarhus, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, or London, or fully remote anywhere in Europe.
• A supportive engineering team that values learning and teaching.
• An annual company-wide getaway, plus an annual product team getaway focused on strategy and cross-team collaboration, alongside regular cross-office collaboration day to day.
• A company computer
• Insurance coverage based on your country of employment
• Retailer discounts

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed