Engineering Manager - Spend Intelligence EU/UK remote (m/f/d)

Pliant

8d • Remote

About The Position

We're seeking an Engineering Manager to help build and lead a brand-new engineering team focused on Spend Intelligence. This is an early-stage team-building role where you will start with a small group of existing engineers and grow the team into a fully-formed product team over the next two to three quarters, together with a Product Manager, a Product Designer, and additional engineers. Initially, you'll be around 50-60% hands-on, with expectations decreasing as the team matures. You'll architect scalable, maintainable, and secure solutions while mentoring and developing your team. You'll collaborate with other (Senior) Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers across PAW (Partners, APIs & Workflows) and the wider Engineering org to define roadmaps, drive execution, and uphold best practices. You'll contribute to the codebase and guide your team in developing innovative solutions for our customers. You’ll have strong partnership from product and engineering leadership while shaping this new team. Spend Intelligence is a new product team forming in 2026 as part of a strategic restructuring within the group, by splitting an existing team. In the short term, Spend Intelligence focuses on: Pliant Assistant (our LLM-powered assistant), AI-driven spend insights and automation, Receipt management, and the supporting AI capabilities needed to deliver these features.

Requirements

• Several years of hands-on backend engineering experience with Java/Kotlin and Spring Boot, plus time spent in a leadership or management role (generally 7+ years total and 2+ years in management).
• Care for engineering craft and the trade-offs behind technical decisions, especially in distributed, testable, and maintainable backend systems.
• Solid working knowledge of REST APIs, relational databases (PostgreSQL), and microservices.
• Experience leading teams, mentoring engineers, and helping people grow into the next step in their career.
• Comfort with ambiguity and product-shaped problems — this team is new and needs someone energized by that rather than waiting for things to be fully defined.
• Genuine interest in building user-facing product features and a healthy skepticism toward AI hype.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to drive projects from concept to completion by leveraging your team's skills.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience with LLMs, agents, RAG, evals, MCPs, or shipping production AI features
• Experience starting a team from scratch or splitting an existing team into focused units
• Experience operating in a regulated environment (fintech, healthtech, etc.)

Responsibilities

• Build and Lead a New Team: Hire, onboard, and grow an interdisciplinary engineering team while staying close to the technology (hands-on in the beginning).
• Support engineers in a psychologically safe environment through regular performance reviews, clear expectations, and direct and supportive feedback.
• Shape the Product Space: Partner with your Product Manager and Product Designer to define the team's mission, problem space, and OKRs.
• Help us answer not only "how do we build this" but also "what is worth building".
• Drive Technical Direction for AI-enabled Features: Guide the team through real product questions — when does an LLM actually improve the experience vs. when a deterministic solution serves users better; how do we evaluate quality, ground responses, and contain failure modes; what belongs in our team vs. as a shared platform capability.
• Mentor and Grow Talent: Foster open communication, career development, and engineering excellence by championing best practices like test-driven bug fixing, automated testing, continuous integration and daily deployments to production.
• Collaborate Across Teams: Work closely with peer EMs, our infrastructure team, and our data team to shape clear interfaces and avoid the "AI team owns everything AI" anti-pattern.
• Manage OKRs and Continuous Improvement: Set and track quarterly team OKRs together with the product manager.
• Promote innovation, knowledge sharing, and ongoing enhancements to maintain a culture of excellence.
• Participate in Hiring and On-Call: Take an active role in interviewing for your team and across Engineering, and join our compensated on-call rotation alongside the team (optional).
• Champion Pliant Values: Embrace and live Pliant's core values — Push It, Own It, Open Up, Be Kind, Have Fun, Be Pliant — while collaborating with peers on company-wide initiatives and fostering a positive team and department culture.

Benefits

• Attractive remuneration
• Your choice of preferred hardware: Windows-based laptop or MacBook Pro
• Flat hierarchy and transparent communication in a relaxed, professional atmosphere
• Opportunity to develop your talent in a dynamic team with ambitious goals
• Flexibility and possibility to work remotely
• English as our working language, with colleagues from many different backgrounds and countries
• Company card with a monthly allowance for lunches, coffee, etc. with co-workers

What This Job Offers

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