Software Engineering Manager

Job description

We’re the Moonpig Group – home to Moonpig, Greetz, Red Letter Days and Buyagift – and we’re on a mission to make people feel loved, celebrated and remembered. Whether it’s a card that gets them laughing out loud or a gift that makes their day, we help people stay close, no matter the miles. We’re proud to be leading the online gifting revolution, with brilliant products, clever tech and a whole lot of heart. Our platform makes it easy to create moments that matter – packed with personal touches and delivered with care. We’re not just about selling cards or gifts – we’re here to spread joy, spark smiles and make every celebration feel extra special. And with values that guide how we work and support one another, we’ve built a place where people (and ideas) can truly thrive. If you’re looking to make an impact, bring your spark and be part of something meaningful – we’d love to have you on the team. 🌙🐷 ### Software Engineering Manager – Reminders | 📍London or Manchester – Hybrid (1–2 days per week in the office) | 💰Competitive Salary + Benefits ### About the Role We’re looking for a **Software Engineering Manager** to lead our Reminders engineering team at Moonpig. This is a hands-on, hybrid role based in **London or Manchester**, with 1–2 days per week in the office. The team’s regular office day is Thursday. Reminders is an important part of how we help customers remember the people and occasions that matter. We’re evolving from an occasion-centric experience towards one that puts the recipient at the centre, bringing together customer data, personalisation and thoughtful UX to help us make more relevant card and gift recommendations. You’ll lead a small team, working closely with Product and Design to shape what comes next. This isn’t a role where Engineering simply receives a roadmap and delivers it. You’ll help create an environment where engineers contribute to discovery, challenge ideas constructively and influence both what we build and how we build it. It’s a role for someone who enjoys moving between technical conversations, coaching people and shaping product direction. ### Our expectations of our Engineering Managers: - **Building culture:** “Culture eats process for breakfast” and we wholeheartedly believe this. As an Engineering Manager you are responsible for fostering a growth culture and contributing to our management best practices. You help us become an exceptional place to work for the ambitious, highly motivated people we hire. Your team of engineers are responsible for various services and you advocate the mantra “You build it, you run it”. At the end of the day, you have a massive influence on our overall engineering quality and culture and you actively work to continuously improve this. - **People progression:** As an Engineering Manager you are also expected to focus on the progression of people. Fifty percent of your time will be focussed on coaching, 121’s, mentoring and driving a high performance engineering culture. You need to be empathetic towards an individual’s needs and ensure we support and grow our engineers. You’ll identify which skill sets are required for the successful delivery of projects, coaching or recruiting engineers to cover any skill shortages. - **Driving good Engineering:** As an Engineering Manager you’ll lead by example, demonstrating best practices, working with your engineers through regular pairing sessions or providing technical leadership to help deliver new features, ensuring that the design and development of our systems adhere to good engineering principles. ### Key Responsibilities: - Jointly own the direction and outcomes of Reminders with Product, balancing customer and business goals with engineering opportunities, constraints and long-term technical needs. - Build a strong Product-Engineering partnership where engineers contribute to discovery, problem definition, prioritisation, solution shaping and evaluating outcomes. - Develop a deep understanding of the Reminders domain, including CRM-backed targeting, customer-facing full-stack experiences and opportunities to make greater use of personalisation. - Stay hands-on and close to the technology, contributing code to Production where appropriate while enabling the team to own critical-path delivery. - Facilitate technical discussions and collaborative engineering sessions, helping the team reach well-reasoned decisions without becoming the default decision-maker. - Encourage healthy technical debate, drawing out different perspectives and helping the team navigate strong opinions or disagreement based on evidence and merit. - Promote pragmatic engineering practices and simple solutions, including sensible build-versus-reuse decisions. - Own engineering delivery across estimation, planning, sequencing, dependencies, risks and clear communication of progress, using relevant metrics to support sustainable and predictable delivery. - Balance customer and business value with maintainability, reliability and technical quality, including sustainable management of technical debt, automated testing and appropriate technical documentation. - Champion strong engineering practices, including collaborative programming, testing approaches such as TDD, CI/CD and production ownership. - Ensure strong observability and operational health, with useful code-quality and Production metrics, appropriate KPIs, well-calibrated alarms and clear ownership of actions following incidents and PIRs. - Build relationships across Moonpig and make effective use of capabilities in Data Science, CRM, platform and other engineering teams to improve personalisation, reduce complexity and manage dependencies. - Use customer, product and engineering data, alongside experimentation where appropriate, to evaluate outcomes and identify opportunities. - Ensure the Reminders area meets relevant privacy, data protection, security and legal requirements, working with specialists including our DPO, Legal and Security teams. - Line manage three permanent engineers and support the effective integration of one contractor, setting clear expectations and creating a high-performing team environment. - Coach and develop engineers through regular 1:1s, timely feedback, development plans, performance reviews and active mentoring. - Own hiring and capability planning, identifying where the team needs to develop or add skills and capacity. - Grow technical leadership throughout the team rather than concentrating technical authority with the Engineering Manager. - Create an inclusive and psychologically safe engineering culture where people can challenge ideas, learn from failure, share feedback and celebrate progress. - Represent the team with technical and non-technical stakeholders, creating clarity around priorities, decisions, risks, trade-offs and dependencies. ### About you: - Experience leading software engineers as an Engineering Manager or in a comparable people-leadership role. This could suit someone earlier in their management career who has already developed strong coaching and leadership skills. - Strong coaching instincts, with experience helping engineers develop their judgement, autonomy and impact. - Engineering expertise at around mid-to-senior Engineer level, with enough technical depth to contribute code and engage confidently in full-stack, cloud, architecture and operational conversations. - Ability to flex between technical leadership and facilitation — knowing when to offer a view, when to challenge and when to create space for others. - Strong understanding of engineering practices such as TDD, collaborative programming, automated testing, CI/CD and production ownership. We care more about how you practise engineering than whether you already know our exact technology stack. - Experience building strong Product-Engineering partnerships and involving engineers in discovery, problem shaping and roadmap decisions. - Experience sharing accountability for customer or business outcomes and translating them into engineering priorities. - Sound technical judgement, with the ability to bring the right people and evidence into decisions without becoming a bottleneck. - Confidence navigating different levels of engagement and opinion within a team, drawing out quieter perspectives and helping people work through disagreement constructively. - Experience planning and delivering software initiatives, including estimation, delivery metrics, dependency and risk management, and balancing feature delivery with experimentation, reliability and technical investment. - Ability to collaborate and influence across Product, Design, Data/Data Science, CRM, Security, Legal, Privacy and other engineering teams. - Experience establishing strong operational ownership of production software, including CI/CD, observability, support practices and continuous improvement. - Commitment to inclusive leadership, frequent feedback and creating an environment where engineers can grow, challenge ideas and take meaningful ownership. - Experience in ecommerce, CRM, customer engagement, retention, reminders or personalisation would be useful, but isn’t essential. - Experience with experimentation, A/B testing or working alongside Data Science or machine-learning teams would also be valuable. ### Our Tech Environment: - Modern backend and full-stack software development, with Node.js/TypeScript and C#/.NET used within Moonpig. Exact stack experience isn’t required. - React, GraphQL and .NET Core across our wider web and API environment. - AWS and serverless cloud technologies. - Terraform for infrastructure as code. - GitHub/GitLab and CI/CD. - Grafana, AWS CloudWatch and other observability and monitoring tooling. - Full-stack customer experiences, CRM-backed targeting, personalisation and experimentation. ### How we get there: - Put engineering into the conversation early, with engineers helping to understand problems and shape solutions rather than simply receiving work to deliver. - Use customer, product and engineering data to understand whether what we build is creating the outcomes we intended. - Keep technical decision-making collaborative and evidence-led, giving engineers autonomy while maintaining a high bar for quality. - Favour simple, pragmatic solutions and reuse existing capabilities when they’re the better option. - Create space for collaborative engineering practices, technical discussion and continuous learning. - Balance delivering today with maintaining reliable, observable and sustainable systems for tomorrow. - Build a team where constructive challenge is welcome, different perspectives are heard and people have the support to grow.