Engineering Manager - Spend Intelligence *EU/UK remote* (m/f/d)

About Pliant

Pliant is a European fintech specializing in B2B payment solutions. Our modular, API-first platform helps businesses streamline spending, improve cash flow, and integrate payments into their financial workflows. Designed for industries with complex payment needs, such as travel and fleet, Pliant enables greater efficiency, control, and profitability.

We serve two primary customer segments:

• Companies looking to optimize operational processes through intuitive apps and APIs, gaining control, automation, and financial flexibility through extended credit lines.
• Businesses such as financial software platforms, ERP providers, and banks that want to launch or enhance their credit card offerings using Pliant's embedded finance and white-label solutions.

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Berlin, Pliant supports over 4,500 businesses and more than 20 partners globally. As a licensed e-money institution (EMI), we issue credit cards in 11 currencies across more than 30 countries, helping companies streamline and simplify payments.

About the Role

We're seeking an Engineering Manager (m/f/d, remote/hybrid) to help build and lead a brand-new engineering team focused on Spend Intelligence — the product space where Pliant helps customers understand, optimize, and increasingly automate their spend through insights and AI.

This is an early-stage team-building role. You'll start with a small group of existing engineers and grow the team into a fully-formed product team over the next two to three quarters, together with a Product Manager, a Product Designer, and additional engineers we're hiring in parallel. Initially, you'll be around 50-60% hands-on. Hands-on expectations are intentionally front-loaded and expected to decrease as the team matures. You'll architect scalable, maintainable, and secure solutions while mentoring and developing your team.

You'll collaborate with other (Senior) Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers across PAW (Partners, APIs & Workflows) and the wider Engineering org to define roadmaps, drive execution, and uphold best practices. You'll contribute to the codebase and guide your team in developing innovative solutions for our customers.

You’ll have strong partnership from product and engineering leadership while shaping this new team.

About the Team

Spend Intelligence is a new product team forming in 2026 as part of a strategic restructuring within the group, by splitting an existing team. In the short term, Spend Intelligence focuses on:

• Pliant Assistant, our LLM-powered assistant — evolving it into a high-quality product experience customers genuinely rely on
• AI-driven spend insights and automation — helping customers understand and optimize their spend, and increasingly automating the steps in between
• Receipt management — extracting data and insights from receipts and building automations based on the data
• The supporting AI capabilities currently needed to deliver these features (foundation-model integrations, retrieval, evaluation, agentic patterns, MCPs).

The team starts with one experienced backend engineer, a frontend engineer, a product designer, and you. We're hiring a Product Manager and several engineers to build out the full team over the next quarters.

What You'll Do

• Build and Lead a New Team: Hire, onboard, and grow an interdisciplinary engineering team while staying close to the technology (hands-on in the beginning). Support engineers in a psychologically safe environment through regular performance reviews, clear expectations, and direct and supportive feedback.
• Shape the Product Space: Partner with your Product Manager and Product Designer to define the team's mission, problem space, and OKRs. Help us answer not only "how do we build this" but also "what is worth building".
• **Drive