Engineering Manager - Sportsbook Experience (Backend)

Hard Rock Digital•United Kingdom, ENG

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Hard Rock Digital is building a team focused on becoming the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead our Sportsbook Experience backend team within the Sportsbook unit. This role involves people leadership, team health, and engineering excellence for the pod that builds and operates the Java/Spring services behind Hard Rock Bet, including event and market data, pricing and odds delivery, betslip and bet placement, cash out, and high-throughput APIs and streaming feeds. The Engineering Manager will partner closely with Product Owners, the Director of Sportsbook, Technical Delivery Leads, and other Engineering Managers to deliver high-quality software aligned with product priorities. A key aspect of this role is championing the use of AI-augmented development, responsible AI practices, and continuous learning to drive AI-led innovation within the team and the product. Hard Rock Digital is committed to becoming an AI-first organization, investing in AI across the stack for various functions like requirements gathering, code review, alert investigation, and testing. The company emphasizes a product-driven approach, clear roles, collaboration, and a high standard for excellence, security, compliance, and operational rigor, especially in the regulated sports betting domain.

Requirements

Several years in technology with a meaningful portion in leadership or management—driving technical excellence, mentoring engineers, and delivering through others.
Backend engineering background with experience building and running production systems in Java with Spring / Spring Boot.
Strong grounding in microservices, REST APIs, event-driven architecture (e.g. Kafka), relational and NoSQL data stores, and operating services on AWS/Kubernetes.
Still read and write code; able to assess a pull request, reason about technical issues, and pair with an engineer on a hard problem.
Self-motivated and autonomous; comfortable with ambiguity and ownership.
Experience or strong interest in sportsbook, trading, real-time/high-throughput systems, or other low-latency regulated platforms.
Comfort with compliance, security, and operational rigor.
Curiosity and openness to AI-augmented development and AI initiatives; eager to learn, adopt approved tools, and help the team work in an AI-first way responsibly.
Strong communication (written and verbal), experience working with Product and other engineering leaders, and a track record of building trust and resolving ambiguity.
Champion inclusion, growth, and a culture where people take ownership and learn from setbacks.
Comfortable promoting both delivery and technical excellence within a product-driven framework.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience).
Proven ability to foster innovation, continuous improvement, and collaboration within a team or technology line.
Experience with agile development and with managing or contributing to backlogs, planning, and delivery metrics.
Demonstrable production experience with Java (17+) and the Spring ecosystem at scale.

Responsibilities

Run regular 1:1s, stand-ups, and ad-hoc support.
Address impediments, clarify priorities, and ensure the team has the resources and context to deliver.
Own performance feedback, career development, and workforce planning.
Monitor sprint progress, adjust priorities when needed, and keep work well scoped and estimated.
Work with Product to break down requirements into clear features and user stories.
Use backlog grooming, sprint planning, and retrospectives to improve predictability and quality.
Partner with Product Owners, Technical Leads, other EMs, and leadership to align on objectives, dependencies, and risks.
Represent the team in cross-team and Sportsbook-wide discussions.
Review pull requests on merit, contribute to design and architecture for our Java/Spring services, help debug production issues, and prototype where it unblocks the team.
Ensure solutions follow our standards and best practices, and support the TL on vendor and technical stakeholder management where it affects your team.
Own the reliability, latency, and correctness of the services your team runs.
Support in-play peaks and major sporting events with strong observability, sensible on-call practices, and genuine learning from incidents.
Assess workload and skills, identify hiring needs, and participate in recruiting and hiring.
Help shape a team that can meet delivery commitments and grow over time.
Foster an inclusive, collaborative environment.
Champion our values and our AI-first direction: encourage use of approved AI tools, reinforce "you own what you check in," and keep the team connected to AI initiatives and learning.