Engineering Manager - Core Platform Backend

Meet DeepL

DeepL, Europe's leading AI company since 2017, is dedicated to breaking down language barriers and bringing cultures closer together. Our expertise in AI and neural networks has enabled us to create cutting-edge communication technologies for businesses, including the acclaimed DeepL Translator which offers 30+ languages, and DeepL Write, our AI writing companion. Our core offering includes a suite of products and tools made for businesses to communicate more effectively, both internally and with their customers around the globe.

What Sets Us Apart

We are committed to innovation and to a nurturing work environment. Founded by developers and researchers, we spend a lot of time actively reviewing the latest trends in generative AI and software engineering. Known for pioneering AI technologies, we dive deep into cutting-edge research to create not only translations, but advanced language solutions. Combining our use of modern technology, comprehensive employee benefits with our open and welcoming work culture is what sets us apart.

Meet the Teams Behind This Journey

We're looking for two Engineering Managers for two closely cooperating platform teams responsible for our core text processing backend services, which are built by integrating advanced neural networks developed by our research department.

Team one is focused on providing APIs to other teams and our customers. In particular, it is responsible for implementing API tasks through neural net inference jobs.

Team two focuses on efficiently scheduling these inference jobs on our neural net infrastructure, using a custom load balancer that dynamically optimises for latency and throughput.

Both teams work closely with the research department to provide state-of-the-art AI technologies to other teams within the company and to our end users.

Your Responsibilities

The core purpose of the Engineering Manager role is to develop a product engineering team to an autonomous, high performing stage and take responsibility for ensuring high quality deliverables:

• Delivery & Excellence: Collaborating with key stakeholders, represent the team’s engineering perspective on the feasibility, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and time-to-market aspects of new or existing services and products. Ensure timely delivery of new features, maintain existing ones, and establish high engineering excellence metrics. Actively contribute to resolving technical issues and challenges by participating in code reviews, system design discussions, and occasionally engaging in hands-on coding to support team members.

• People Leadership: Inspire, develop, recruit, and motivate a software engineering team. Conduct regular 1:1s with team members, set individual development or improvement plans, and foster a healthy, non-retaliatory feedback culture within the team.

• Team Management: As a collaborative partner with a member of the Product Management team, jointly oversee the team’s strategy, quarterly goals, and business-technical metrics. Ensure the team's development process methodology is optimal, actively participate in building and maintaining the technical roadmap, and take ownership of technical incident management. Dedicate time and resources to quality efforts, maintain a current knowledge base and documentation for the team's services and artifacts, and coordinate resource planning in collaboration with the Senior Engineering Manager and Craft Leads as needed.

• Manage growth: You derive satisfaction from navigating change and collaboratively discovering innovative solutions with your team and various stakeholders within a dynamic and evolving environment.

• Strategic Leadership: Responsibility includes guiding the strategic direction of the team's engagements and collaborating with stakeholders. Not directly involved in software delivery, the role necessitates a profound understanding of technical architecture, potential challenges, and aligning the team's work with broader organizational goals.

Qualities We Look For

• Track record of successfully leading and scaling a software development team with backend scope
• High level of hands-on technical experience in software development and architecture, with several years of experience working as a senior software developer
• You would enjoy a 30% share of hands-on technical work (code and architecture reviews, technical design, hands-on coding, ...)
• Experience in back-end development and system design
• Proficiency in modern C++
• You are a pragmatic problem solver who enjoys both the technical and non-technical challenges associated with the responsibilities of an Engineering Manager
• Excellent communication skills in English with a strong sense of empathy and a solution-oriented mindset
• Solid understanding of computational complexity and common data structures; comfortable reasoning about the time and space complexity of code and choosing appropriate data structures to efficiently solve algorithmic challenges
• Degree in Computer Science or Mathematics or equivalent experience an advantage