Engineering Manager - Workflows

About the role

We are looking for an Engineering Manager (f/m/d) to lead one of Contentful's highly leveraged platform teams: Workflows. This team owns Contentful's Orchestration Platform — the workflow and automation engine behind approvals, tasks, triggers, and action execution. This is a high-impact role: your work will accelerate many product teams and improve the foundation customers rely on every day.

What you'll do

• Build and support high-performing, globally distributed teams, with a culture of collaboration, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Partner closely with Product and Design to shape and deliver the roadmap for UI Foundations and Workflows, balancing near-term needs with long-term platform health.
• Enable platform adoption across teams through clear interfaces, documentation, migration support, and predictable release practices.
• Evolve the orchestration platform (workflow APIs, execution semantics, integrations/actions, reliability/observability) to support approvals, tasks, triggers, and automation at scale.
• Strengthen operational practices with healthy on-call/support models, incident response, post-incident learning, and measurable reliability improvements.
• Coach and develop engineers across levels, supporting growth, feedback, and sustainable delivery habits.
• Collaborate with AI Enablement and product teams so AI-powered capabilities integrate cleanly into workflows and UI foundations with clear boundaries and reliable behavior.

What you'll need

• 2+ years of experience managing cross-functional development teams and delivering complex solutions with Product and Design partners.
• Comfortable working in ambiguity and change, bringing structure and clarity while balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform strategy.
• Experience with platform or foundational teams where success depends on adoption, stability, documentation, and thoughtful rollout/migration support.
• Technical breadth across modern web platforms and backend distributed systems; able to review architecture, ask strong questions, and help teams make good tradeoffs.
• Familiarity with event-driven distributed systems concepts such as queues, orchestration, retries, idempotency, long-running workflows, and reliability.
• Strong quality mindset for platforms: observability, incident readiness, performance, safe rollout practices (versioning, backwards compatibility, migrations, deprecations).
• Strong collaboration across many stakeholders and teams, helping align on priorities, dependencies, and sequencing with transparency.
• People leadership strength: hiring, coaching, feedback, and creating an inclusive environment where engineers can do their best work.

Nice to have

• Experience building workflow/automation platforms (state machines, orchestration engines, integration ecosystems) with strong operability requirements.
• Familiarity with security/compliance considerations for systems that execute actions and integrate with external services (auditability, permissions, data handling).
• Experience with B2B SaaS and enterprise expectations (security, compliance, reliability).

What they offer

• Stock options for full-time employees
• Fertility and family building benefits with a lifetime reimbursable wallet
• Generous paid time off including vacation, sick, education, compassion, and volunteer days
• Personal annual education budget to improve your skills
• Annual wellbeing stipend for physical, financial, or emotional health
• Monthly phone/internet stipend and new hire office equipment stipend