Engineering Manager (C0D4B82)

Referment is working with an FCA-regulated cross-border payments and foreign exchange business that builds and runs its own banking platform. This role leads the Banking and FX team, which owns payment processing, FX pricing and trading, the ledger, reconciliation, bank integrations, FIX engine connectivity, payment compliance and the client portal. You'll manage six to eight engineers and own the team's delivery and OKRs, working with product, design and stakeholders across the business to turn client problems into software that actually ships and gets supported. This isn't a fully hands-on role, but you need to be technical enough to help your team when they need it, review code and break the tie when a decision has to be made. The Role - Own delivery and OKRs for the team: forecast it, sequence it, and say early when something is slipping. - Work with product, design and stakeholders to turn client problems into shipped software, and push past the first solution offered to the problem underneath it. - Take the parts of agile that create real agility — small changes, short feedback loops and the ability to change direction when a client need does — and drop the parts that are just ceremony. - Manage up: keep leadership and the people who need to know informed early, especially when the news isn't good. - Lead six to eight engineers, covering one-to-ones, progression and performance, plus hiring and onboarding as the team changes. - Set a high bar and grow people into it through mentoring, honest feedback and design and code review. - Share technical direction with the senior engineers: run the discussion, break the tie when there is one and make sure the decision gets written down. - Hold the line on quality and testing standards, improve the team's security posture, and run its services in production — client money moves through them, so incident response, on-call health and blameless reviews are yours, and what the team learns has to change something. - Work with compliance and risk so changes to how money moves carry evidence, and argue for changing processes that get in the way of good engineering. - Decide how the team uses AI — AI coding assistants are used daily here, and the team wants a manager with a view on where they help and where they quietly make a mess. What We're Looking For - Experience leading and managing engineers, including the hard parts: hiring, performance and the conversations nobody enjoys. - Strong C#, Azure and SQL — enough depth to review a design, see the risk in it and be taken seriously by senior engineers. - You've delivered in a team that ran its own business-critical services in production. - Comfort with asynchronous, event-driven systems and the failure modes that come with them; most of what the team builds works that way. - Product-minded, able to say why a piece of work matters to a client without reaching for the roadmap. - Enough tolerance for ambiguity to absorb some of it instead of passing it all down. - You know when to hold a technical line and when to let the team make a call you'd have made differently. - Real experience building software with AI, not just an interest in it. - A background in regulated work, where changes to how money moves need evidence behind them. Useful, But Not Required Payment processing systems, double-entry ledgers, FX products and pricing, reconciliation and breaks, payment compliance, bank and scheme integrations, or FIX protocol and market connectivity. This could suit an engineering manager who has led a team running its own production services and wants ownership of both delivery and people in a regulated, money-movement setting, including those from payments, banking or trading backgrounds. The role is hybrid and based in London. #Referment