Senior Engineering Manager

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead three engineering squads at JUPUS, one of the fastest-growing legal-tech companies in Europe.

This is a people and process leadership role. You won't write production code, but you need to understand our stack (Django, Vue, PostgreSQL/pgvector, AWS, LLM-powered product) well enough to challenge technical decisions, assess feasibility, and hold a high bar on quality

Reporting to the Head of Engineering, you'll own the operational excellence of three squads: how they run delivery cycles, how accurately they estimate, how consistently they follow process, and how effectively they ship.

Your Challenge and Opportunity

You'll be accountable for the predictability, throughput, and quality of the squads you lead. That means keeping initiatives moving cleanly through Discovery and Delivery, ensuring estimates are realistic and met, and leaving each cycle better than the last. This is a player-coach management role: your "playing" is managing, coaching, and process leadership, not committing code. You'll develop Engineering Leads and engineers, run cycle rituals, unblock teams, and drive cross-squad coordination.

You'll also help us operate as a genuinely AI-native engineering organisation. Agentic coding is already our default, which means the bottlenecks have shifted: writing code is cheap, while verification, planning, and process discipline are where leverage lives.

Your job is to reinforce the norms that serve us and pragmatically retire the ones that don't. You will be the person who makes our engineering process actually work day to day: enforcing it where it serves us, and pragmatically evolving it where it does not.

Tasks

Delivery Excellence & Cycle Ownership

• Own each squad's delivery cycle (planning, rituals, mid-cycle adjustments, and retrospectives) so cycles are predictable and improving
• Ensure every initiative flows correctly through Discovery, Refinement, Delivery, Rollout, and Post-Delivery, with risk surfaced early through timely feasibility assessments and spikes
• Drive estimation excellence: coach teams to produce realistic estimates, set milestones that emerge from them, and hold squads to committed dates
• Track and improve technical KPIs: lead time, PR cycle time, change failure rate, defect density, and date predictability
• Drive cross-squad coordination on shared initiatives, dependencies, and reusable components

Process Leadership

• Enforce our Product Development Process consistently across all three squads; kick-offs, refinement, technical and testing plans, and delivery rituals are non-negotiable
• Ensure every squad member knows and follows the process. Gaps in adherence are a leadership failure, not an engineer failure
• Continuously evaluate processes and retire those that no longer serve us

Team Leadership & People Management

• Manage, coach, and develop three engineering squads, owning their delivery health, team composition, and career development
• Develop Engineering Leads so they own technical feasibility, refinement, estimation, and delivery excellence within their squad
• Foster a culture of ownership, psychological safety, and high performance
• Own onboarding for your squads

Technical Partnership

• Understand our stack (Django, Vue, PostgreSQL/pgvector, AWS, LLM/agentic AI pipelines) well enough to challenge decisions, assess feasibility, and ask the right questions, without writing the code yourself
• Partner with the CTO, Head of Engineering, Product, Design, and QE to keep delivery aligned end-to-end
• Translate technical complexity into clear trade-offs for both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Running an AI-Native Engineering Organisation

• Champion agentic coding as the default way squads build, test, and refactor, with a "trust but verify" approach that concentrates human review w