Engineering Manager
TypeScript, React, Node.js, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform
At Wave Talent, we don’t want to consume any more of your time trying to decipher job descriptions to identify the information you need. Instead, we spoke with you all to understand the key information you’d like to know about a job position before you enter the process.
Hopefully, you’ll find this listed below and if the job role sounds like it could be up your street; we’d love to arrange a chat to give you more info.
We’ve partnered with a high-growth B2B SaaS business using AI and automation to transform how large construction projects are tendered and procured, and we’re hiring two Engineering Managers to take direct leadership of two of their three engineering teams.
This is a player-coach role by design: more than half of your week is spent writing code, reviewing pull requests and shaping architecture alongside your team. The business is remote-first across Europe with an office in Berlin for those who want it.
Here’s everything you need to know:
💰 Salary: €120,000 - €150,000 per annum (DOE), plus a permanent contract and equipment.
💻 Benefits: Fully flexible remote or office working, flexible hours, new MacBook Pro, company off-sites twice a year including full-week working sessions, regular team events, and a genuine output-focused culture rather than hours tracked.
🚀 Industry/Type of business: AI-enabled construction technology (procurement and tendering SaaS).
🏠 Work location: Remote-first across Europe, with a modern Berlin office available. Berlin is preferred but not essential.
🧩 Interview process: 3 stages - a 30 minute screen with one of the engineering team covering technical and leadership background, a 90 minute coding challenge (the same one used for their full stack hires), and a 60 minute final interview with the CTO covering leadership depth, technical depth and culture fit.
🦄 Reporting to: Co-Founder and CTO.
👏 Company size: 18 engineers across three teams, growing to five teams over the next year, in a business that exceeded its sales targets last year and has just closed a new funding round.
🎯 Working on: Leading a team of five to six full stack and AI/ML engineers across one of two domains - either the core platform (authentication, authorisation, DevOps, marketplace dynamics, matching and ranking) or the bills of quantities and construction documents area, which includes an AI agent for creating and working with those documents. You’ll own delivery and technical quality for your team’s roadmap, run 1:1s, feedback and growth plans, partner closely with your Product Manager to turn vague ideas into shipped outcomes, and stay hands-on in the TypeScript stack every week. They practise trunk-based development with daily releases, a comprehensive Cypress E2E suite, and CI/CD into AWS via Kubernetes with everything managed in Terraform.
We’d love to chat with you about this position if:
✅ You’ve got extensive hands-on experience (typically 7+ years) building large-scale web applications in TypeScript, across both frontend and backend, and you still write it daily.
✅ You have real people leadership experience, whether as an Engineering Manager, or as a team lead or senior tech lead with direct reports, 1:1s, mentoring and performance conversations under your belt.
✅ You’re technically at a level comparable to a principal engineer. Technical ability is non-negotiable here and is assessed with the same coding challenge used for their senior engineering hires.
✅ You actively want to keep coding. This role is 60-80% hands-on by design, and that’s the part that should excite you.
✅ You’ve worked in a high-growth startup or scale-up environment (Series A to C equivalent) and are comfortable with the pace, ambiguity and ownership that comes with it.
✅ You’re a strong communicator in English, and can hold your own with product and leadership as easily as with engineers.
Based on the client’s criteria, any of the below would make you a top applicant for this role:
Familiarity with LLM-based applications or ML-adjacent work, as your team will include AI/ML engineers.
Experience scaling an engineering function through a period of rapid team growth.
Experience in a highly regarded, product-led technology business.
A track record of taking a vague product idea through to a delivered outcome with a team you led.
Whilst candidates who don’t have this experience will be considered, we prefer to be transparent as to what background the ideal candidate will have.
Please note, due to the volume of applications we receive, we are unable to respond to every application individually. If you have not heard back within 10 working days, please assume your application has not been successful on this occasion.
