Engineering Manager - Spend Intelligence *EU/UK remote*

About the role

Engineering Manager to 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 starting with a small group of existing engineers and growing over two to three quarters. Initially around 50-60% hands-on, with hands-on expectations decreasing as the team matures.

What you'll do

• Build and Lead a New Team: Hire, onboard, and grow an interdisciplinary engineering team while staying close to the technology. Support engineers 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.
• Drive Technical Direction for AI-enabled Features: Guide the team through real product questions — when does an LLM actually improve the experience vs. when a deterministic solution serves users better; how do we evaluate quality, ground responses, and contain failure modes.
• Mentor and Grow Talent: Foster open communication, career development, and engineering excellence by championing best practices like test-driven bug fixing, automated testing, continuous integration and daily deployments to production.
• Collaborate Across Teams: Work closely with peer EMs, infrastructure team, and data team to shape clear interfaces and avoid the "AI team owns everything AI" anti-pattern.
• Manage OKRs and Continuous Improvement: Set and track quarterly team OKRs together with the product manager. Promote innovation, knowledge sharing, and ongoing enhancements.

What you'll need

• Several years of hands-on backend engineering experience with Java/Kotlin and Spring Boot, plus time spent in a leadership or management role (generally 7+ years total and 2+ years in management).
• Care for engineering craft and the trade-offs behind technical decisions, especially in distributed, testable, and maintainable backend systems.
• Solid working knowledge of REST APIs, relational databases (PostgreSQL), and microservices.
• Experience leading teams, mentoring engineers, and helping people grow into the next step in their career.
• Comfort with ambiguity and product-shaped problems — this team is new and needs someone energized by that rather than waiting for things to be fully defined.
• Genuine interest in building user-facing product features and a healthy skepticism toward AI hype.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with LLMs, agents, RAG, evals, MCPs, or shipping production AI features
• Experience starting a team from scratch or splitting an existing team into focused units
• Experience operating in a regulated environment (fintech, healthtech, etc.)

What they offer

• The opportunity to work in a growing team with big responsibilities