Engineering Manager, Product Engineering

Secfix

1d•Remote

About The Position

Secfix is seeking an Engineering Manager for Product Engineering to join their remote team, preferably based in Germany/Munich (CET/CEST timezone). The company, co-founded by CTO Grigory, automates security compliance (ISO 27001, GDPR, TISAX, SOC 2) for over 1.78 million SMBs in Europe, integrating with various tech stacks to streamline certification processes. Secfix has successfully raised €17M (€12M Series A) and is on a profitable trajectory, aiming for European market leadership. The role is crucial as the CTO is currently handling engineering management for a team of five engineers and a product designer, and needs a strong individual contributor who can also lead. The position emphasizes a "strong engineer first, manager second" philosophy, where the leader makes the team faster, clearer, and more confident through deep technical expertise. The company is also heavily invested in AI, with a new AI product (CISO AI) requiring significant engineering work in agentic workflows, intelligent evidence collection, and context-aware policy generation. The successful candidate will have a huge impact on engineering culture and customer experience, with plans to double the engineering team in the next 12 months.

Requirements

8+ years of backend/product engineering experience, with a track record of owning large, complex systems end-to-end at a principal engineer level or equivalent.
1–3 years of engineering management experience, including 1:1s, performance conversations, and hiring, ideally at a similar stage company.
Strong hands-on experience with AI-assisted coding tools (Cursor, Claude), with extensive experimentation and knowledge of their effectiveness.
Solid OOP fundamentals.
Some experience with Java Spring Boot, Hibernate, or equivalent.
Experience building or integrating AI/ML features in production.
Practical experience working with LLMs and RAG-based systems.
Experience leading system design on significant projects.
Strong troubleshooting and debugging skills, capable of resolving complex issues.
Proficiency in relational database design and SQL optimisation.
Experience designing technical interviews and evaluating senior engineering candidates.
Strong written and in-person communication skills.
Comfortable working in a remote, in-sync-first culture.
Startup experience, understanding the challenges of building without an existing playbook.
Ability to work in European timezone (CET/CEST), ideally based in Germany or EMEA.

Nice To Haves

Recent experience with modern Java applications in a production environment (Java Spring Boot, Python, Golang).
Experience establishing salary bands, performance review frameworks, or engineering hiring processes from scratch.
Previous experience at a fully remote company.

Responsibilities

Become a strong individual contributor by getting into the codebase and shipping a meaningful feature in the first month (70–80% coding time).
Take over engineering interviews and build a better technical interview process in the second month.
Design technical challenges, run screens, and make hiring more consistent and repeatable.
Help design a pragmatic, simple, measurable, and non-bureaucratic way to evaluate team performance in the third month.
Conduct regular 1:1s with each team member, focusing on output x impact, quality, and AI efficiency.
Identify team members who are behind and help them improve.
Remove obstacles from top performers.
Own system design on the biggest projects, including writing technical specs, presenting architecture, getting alignment, and driving to production.
Scale the product for mid-market by building features like granular RBAC, sub-workspace collaboration, and new control layers.
Push the AI product forward by defining backend architecture for agentic compliance workflows, intelligent evidence collection, and context-aware policy generation.
Bring AI-assisted engineering to the whole team by experimenting with new tools and sharing findings.
Fix critical customer-facing problems immediately and high-severity issues within 48 hours.
Ensure every bug has an owner.
Participate in weekly quality reviews as part of Monday planning.
Stay close to customers through CS check-ins, support tickets, Mixpanel events, and onboarding calls to gather feedback.

Benefits

100% remote with a real virtual office in Gather.
Competitive salary, benchmarked to European market rates (specifics shared upon discussion).
Generous equity package.
€1,000/year development budget.
Remote workspace support.
Co-working access.
26 days holidays + local public holidays.
Comprehensive health insurance.
Annual retreat (e.g., Costa Brava, Austrian Alps, Portugal, Italy, Spanish Islands).
MacBook, monitors, headphones.