Engineering Manager - Platform

About The Role We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Product Platform team, a group of six backend and DevOps engineers who own the foundations of the IP Fabric product: how it is structured, built, tested, deployed, licensed, and run. The team is in the middle of meaningful modernisation work. That includes decomposing a monolithic application into clearer boundaries, evolving deployment from a Debian package model toward containers, reworking build and test pipelines, and improving the stability and performance of core services that every other engineering team depends on. You will lead and grow that team, stay technically close to the work, and partner with Product to build a roadmap that connects platform engineering to business outcomes. A significant part of this role is making sure the wider organisation understands the value the team delivers. Your success is measured by team effectiveness, delivery, and the organisation's trust in the platform team, not by your personal code output. What You’ll Do - Lead, coach, and support a team of senior backend and DevOps engineers - Build a business-driven platform roadmap in partnership with Product, and communicate it clearly to engineering leadership and stakeholders - Make the team's work legible: connect platform initiatives to delivery speed, stability, security, and customer impact - Establish a clear intake model for requests from feature teams, Product, QA, and Support, and hold sensible ownership boundaries - Guide technical decision-making and architectural direction, including deployment modernisation and application decomposition - Create a healthy, predictable delivery environment that accounts for both planned initiatives and interrupt-driven work - Represent platform constraints and dependencies to the teams that build on top of the platform - Hire, onboard, and grow engineers over time What You'll Need - Experience leading software engineers in a product company - Strong background in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering - Demonstrated ability to define technical direction and justify it to non-engineering stakeholders - Comfortable with architecture, deployment, and performance discussions at a level that earns the respect of senior engineers - Ability to balance technical depth with people leadership - Clear, pragmatic communication style in English, written and spoken Bonus points if you have - Experience leading a platform, developer experience, or enablement team - Familiarity with Node.js / TypeScript and Python - Experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, containers and Kubernetes, and CI/CD systems - Experience with on-prem as well as cloud delivery models - Experience with application modernisation or monolith decomposition - Experience working closely with Product Managers on internal or platform products Benefits & Perks - 25 days of holidays + 5 flexi-days. - Pluxee Flexi Card (up to 16 000 CZK per year). - Anniversary rewards. - Collaboration with diverse, international teams. - A pet-friendly office at IP Pavlova. - Complementary and yummy snacks, coffee, brew and refreshments. - Regular team and company events.