Senior Engineering Manager

STRICTLY NO AGENCIES. We are only accepting direct applications for this role. Any unsolicited CVs sent will be treated as a gift and will not be subject to any terms or fees. RECRUITERS: please do not call or email us regarding this role.

HYBRID: THREE DAYS A WEEK IN OUR FARRINGDON, LONDON OFFICE

Stack: Next.js, React and TypeScript on the front end. Laravel and PHP on the back end. A legacy PHP and CodeIgniter platform being modernised alongside it. AWS underneath. Claude Code used throughout engineering.

About Eventogy

Eventogy Ltd is a UK event management SaaS company based in Farringdon, London. Twenty years old, profitable, privately held. Our clients are large international enterprises in regulated sectors: Deutsche Bank, Santander, BNPP, Ford, Kia, Toyota, Linklaters, Clifford Chance and Freshfields among them. The bar for what we ship is set by those customers, not by us.

The role

You will own the engineering team's delivery, every day. What was promised lands, at the standard our clients expect, and problems surface at the start of the week, not the day before a deadline. The work is predominantly on our new platform, built on Next.js and Laravel. Our original PHP and CodeIgniter platform runs alongside it while clients move across.

Engineering is organised into two pods. Each pod is given its own features, epics and technical challenges, and each is led by a hands-on Principal Engineer who reports to you. You drive both pods, and the Principal Engineers are how you do it: each leads their pod technically and is accountable to you for its output. Together you form a small leadership trident, which you head, that owns the technical side of the platform and its delivery: architecture, platform, engineering standards and technical decisions. The Principal Engineers lead technical direction for the areas their pods own and keep both pods building the same way. You set the direction for both pods and the order of ownership and accountability, hold each pod to its output, and make the call when the Principal Engineers cannot agree.

The lines are clear. The CTO sets technology strategy and security, and is ultimately accountable for the platform. The Product Owner owns what gets built. The Delivery Manager owns the plan and its timelines, manages stakeholders, and is the team's voice to the rest of the business. You own the technical delivery behind all of it, and the technical operation of the platform in production. You are the critical path: every date the Delivery Manager communicates is one you are accountable for engineering to hit. You report to the CTO and work directly with the CEO on delivery.

That makes your partnership with the Delivery Manager the centre of the job. You size work with the Product Owner and Delivery Manager before it is committed, so the dates that go out are ones the team can hit. You give the Delivery Manager an honest, early read on progress and risk, so the business hears about a problem while there is still time to act on it. Then you make the dates happen. You will be measured on delivery outcomes.

We work on a simple principle: build it, run it, own it. The engineers who write a feature are the ones who deploy it, support it in production and answer for how it performs. You will embed that across the team, and it starts with you: this role owns the whole of the technical delivery, not just the plan.

This is a hands-on role. Expect to spend 20 to 30 percent of your time writing code: enough to stay credible with the team and close to the codebase, not so much that you disappear into it.

It is not a role for someone who wants to keep a calendar and report status upwards. It is for someone who takes delivery personally: who steps in, unblocks, re-plans and keeps pushing until the work is live.

What you will do

• Drive both pods day to day, through the two Principal Engineers. Know where every piece of work stands, and challenge it when a task has taken far longer than it should
• Head the leadership trident with the two Principal Engineers: agree and write down the decisions on architecture, platform and standards, and settle technical disagreements between the pods
• Size work with the Product Owner and Delivery Manager before it is committed, in enough detail to plan against and to give clients dates
• Work hand in hand with the Delivery Manager: she owns the plan and the stakeholder conversation, you own the engineering behind it, including dependencies, technical risk and team capacity
• Raise slippage with the Delivery Manager early and honestly, with a recovery plan attached, so she can manage expectations before a date is missed
• Own the delivery numbers, work committed against work delivered and time from start to live, and report them weekly to the CTO and CEO
• Make build it, run it, own it the way the team works: engineers take their work from ticket to production and stay accountable for it once it is live, with no handing problems over the wall
• Own production across both platforms, including our original platform, and the on-call rota that supports it
• Set, publish and enforce the engineering standard for code review, testing and releases through the trident, applied to everyone, and to AI-written code as much as human-written
• Own people, performance, and pay and review conversations across both pods, drawing on each Principal Engineer's view of the engineers in their pod
• Hire, onboard and performance-manage engineers, dealing with under-delivery directly and fairly and running formal processes properly when they are needed
• Write code yourself for 20 to 30 percent of your time
• Run a lean engineering rhythm: planning, stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives that earn their time

What success looks like at 90 days

• Work delivered against work committed is measurably higher than when you arrived
• The trident is running, with a written engineering standard published and applied to both pods
• The quarter's committed work has landed as promised

Requirements

You have run engineering delivery before

• At least four years leading software engineers in a technical delivery capacity, accountable for what shipped and when, not only for technical direction
• You have led a team of five to ten engineers on a live SaaS product
• A record of shipping committed work to agreed dates that you can talk through in specifics: what was promised, what landed, and what you did when it went wrong
• You have taken an underperforming team up a level, and can say exactly what you changed and how

You estimate and plan seriously

• You have built estimates other people relied on, and you can explain your method: decomposition, ranges, confidence and contingency
• You measure how accurate your estimates turn out to be, and you improve them
• You tell stakeholders bad news early, with a plan attached

You are hands-on in our stack

• Current, hands-on skill with Next.js, React and TypeScript, and with Laravel and PHP. You can pick up a ticket yourself, not just review one
• You already work AI-first: tools such as Claude Code are part of how you build every day, and you know where they help and where they hurt
• Comfortable reading code, reviewing pull requests and challenging an estimate or a design on its technical merits
• A working understanding of CI/CD, environments, releases and running production on AWS

You lead people well

• Direct, fair and comfortable having hard conversations about performance
• You have run formal performance processes properly, from the first conversation to the outcome
• You have led through tech leads or principal engineers, giving them real technical ownership while holding them to account for their team's output
• You build accountability in a team without micromanaging it
• You have made engineers responsible for their work in production, not just for getting it merged, and can explain how you made that stick

Nice to have

• Experience with regulated enterprise clients, such as banks or law firms
• Modernising or migrating a legacy platform while still shipping on it
• CodeIgniter or other legacy PHP frameworks
• Event technology
• Working under ISO 27001 or through client security reviews

This probably is not for you if

• You see the job as running ceremonies and reporting status
• You consider delivery someone else's problem once the estimate is agreed
• You think production support belongs to a different team from the one that wrote the code
• You would rather not report delivery numbers every week, good or bad
• You want to stop writing code entirely, or to write code full time
• You want a fixed routine and a clean finish at five o'clock whatever state the release is in
• You are looking for a fully remote role

Benefits

How we work

• A small, senior team where decisions are made quickly and you work closely with the CTO and CEO
• Hybrid, three days a week in our Farringdon office. There is a good coffee shop next door and a food market outside
• A bonus tied to delivery results
• Company pension scheme
• Gym membership
• Multiple progression routes: leadership, product or deep technical
• Serious investment in AI tooling and training

How to apply

Apply with your CV and answer both questions below on the application form. Applications without answers to both will not be reviewed.

1. Tell us about a delivery commitment that was at risk of slipping. How did you spot it, what did you do, and how did it end?
2. How do you build an estimate you would put your name to? Walk us through a real example, and tell us how close the outcome came.

We are an equal opportunities employer. You must be eligible to work in the UK without requiring sponsorship, hold a valid visa or UK residency, be currently based in the UK, and be prepared to undergo high-level security clearance.

NO AGENCIES.