Engineering Manager (Internal Developer Experience & AI Tooling)

Job description

## What do we do? Paddle offers digital product companies a completely different approach to their payment infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, we’re a Merchant of Record for our customers. That means we take away 100% of the pain of payment fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, cheaper, and, above all, way better. We’re backed by investors including KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, Notion, and 83North and serve over 10,000 software sellers in 245 territories globally. ## The role We're looking for an ambitious Engineering Manager to lead our **Application Excellence (AppEx)** team, one of two teams in our wider **Platform** group, alongside SRE. AppEx exists to make Paddle's engineers faster and more effective: improving the internal developer experience, establishing golden paths and best practices, building self-serve tooling, and removing operational friction so product teams can focus on their domains. It's a high-leverage role, your work directly changes how every engineer at Paddle builds and ships. AppEx is also building Paddle's AI software factory: an SDLC where AI agents take on a growing share of the work, from writing code to reviewing it, inside the golden paths, guardrails and quality gates we own. There's a strong appetite for a better developer experience, but the specific path is open: a big part of the job is listening, gathering, and synthesizing feedback, forming a clear diagnosis, and bringing stakeholders with you before you execute. Success depends on alignment as much as delivery. You'll report to the **Director of Engineering** who looks after the Platform group, a group that acts as a multiplier for the product teams, taking ownership and providing the tooling that lets them keep adding value while spending as little time as possible on operational concerns. ## Tech stack - **Go** for our new services - **PHP Laravel** for our Classic system - **Aurora MySQL and PostgreSQL** for persistent data storage - **Docker** in production and local development - **AWS ECS Fargate** for our runtime - **AWS SQS** for asynchronous message queues - **AWS EventBridge** for our event bus - **Redis** for key/value store - **Terraform** for resource management - **Honeycomb, SLOs and OpenTelemetry** for our observability needs - AI code review and coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, MCP) across the SDLC ## What you'll do - Lead the team to deliver initiatives to a high standard, from concept and planning through to rollout, working closely with engineers and stakeholders across the organization. - Own developer productivity and internal developer experience as outcomes you lead. - Shape Paddle's AI software factory: agents working across the SDLC, from ticket to merged PR, with the guardrails, golden paths and quality gates that keep it safe. Measure its impact on cycle time and quality, not just adoption. - Listen across the organization, synthesize feedback, and build buy-in before committing the team to a direction, then own a clear, well-argued roadmap for sustainable impact. - Coordinate across team boundaries, including with SRE, Security, Principal Engineers, and leadership, influencing without relying on authority. - Manage and coach your engineers, enabling their personal and professional growth and high-impact team performance. - Stay hands-on and technically credible, contributing to code and reviews, while focusing on direction, alignment, and unblocking the team. - Oversee the team's technical decisions and contribute to the Platform group's technical strategy. - Look after the team's shared libraries and tools, maintaining code relied upon by dozens of other services, leading its upkeep and safe rollout to benefit the entire engineering organization. - Drive improvements to group processes, developer experience, and the reliability and scalability of a high-traffic, event-driven system, with autonomy to change what isn't working. ## We'd love to hear from you if you: - Significant experience as a senior engineer on complex, large-scale, cloud-based systems (Go a plus), including time on Platform or Internal Developer Experience teams - Management experience with several direct reports (2+ years) at at least two places, and a genuine passion for developing people - Excited by and have specific experience building products for internal stakeholders and developers - Excellent at building trust and alignment: gather and synthesise feedback, communicate a clear rationale, and bring people with you before executing; can read a room and adapt - Hold your plans loosely: form strong views from evidence, update them readily with new information, and are comfortable being wrong - Thrive in ambiguity, shaping loosely-defined problems into a clear, sequenced path while still moving at pace - Strong, demonstrable understanding of what makes a high-performing and sustainable engineering team - Proactive and take ownership, while staying self-aware and always pushing to get better - Hands-on experience running AI code review or agent-driven development in a real SDLC, and an opinion on where it helps and where it doesn't ## Everyone is welcome at Paddle At Paddle, we’re committed to removing invisible barriers, both for our customers and within our teams. We recognise and celebrate that every Paddler is unique, and we welcome every individual perspective. As an inclusive employer, we don’t care where you studied, what you look like, or where you’re from. We care about your craft, your curiosity, your passion for learning, and what you’ll add to our culture. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement, especially if you’re part of an underrepresented group. **Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to support you during the application process or in the workplace.** We’ll do everything we can to provide the accommodations you need. We’re committed to building a diverse team where everyone feels safe to be their authentic self. Let’s grow together. ## Why you’ll love working at Paddle We are a diverse, growing group of Paddlers across the globe who pride ourselves on our transparent, collaborative, and respectful culture. We live and breathe our values: **Paddle for others** **Paddle together** **Paddle simply** We offer a full suite of benefits, including competitive salaries, stock options, retirement plans, private healthcare, and well-being initiatives. We invest in learning and will help you with your personal development via constant exposure to new challenges, an annual learning fund, and regular internal and external training. **Connecting at Paddle** We’re a **‘digital-first’ company**, which means our Paddlers always have the freedom to choose where, when and how they work within our hub locations. We recognize that where our Paddlers do their best work is unique to them and we provide trust and autonomy for everyone to work in a way which fits them best. We also value the power of connection and have invested in global hubs which help local communities flourish and bring us together for focused collaboration. Our Paddle hubs: - **In Europe:** UK (London headquarters), Portugal (Lisbon hub), Netherlands and Ireland (Dublin hub) - **In North America:** Austin, TX (USA) and Toronto (Canada) Our hub philosophy creates an engaging experience for all Paddlers, wherever, whenever and however we choose to work. To support this, we focus hiring within our hubs and will always openly share the available locations for each open position on our job description.