Engineering Manager (Developer Platform)

Lead Sendcloud's Developer Platform from Eindhoven: empower engineers with great tooling, foster reliability, and grow a diverse, high-impact team. Join us today as an Engineering Manager! 🚀

Platform Engineering sits at the foundation of Sendcloud's e-commerce shipping platform. Its mission is to make reliability, security, and cost efficiency core capabilities — and to give every product team the tools they need to move fast without breaking things. The Developer Platform team is the engine behind that: CI/CD, GitOps, internal developer tooling, observability, and engineering standards that actually get adopted. Sendcloud is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead it.

The Role

The Developer Platform team operates as an advisory and enablement function: it proposes and enforces engineering standards, builds the tooling that makes those standards achievable, measures whether adoption is happening, and escalates when it isn't. The team owns CI/CD pipelines and GitLab CI templates, Argo CD and progressive delivery tooling, the Internal Developer Platform, developer tooling, developer experience and onboarding, observability for engineers, and engineering standards and DORA metrics tracking.

• As the Engineering Manager for Developer Platform, your team's success is measured by how much better every other engineer at Sendcloud is able to work.
• Reporting to the Head of Platform Engineering, you act as both people manager and de facto product owner — setting priorities, gathering feedback from internal users, and connecting the work to outcomes, not just outputs.
• You'll be coached and supported by the Head of Platform Engineering, working alongside a peer EM running the Foundation Platform team.

What you'll do

Lead and Grow Your Team

• Run meaningful 1:1s focused on growth and career development, not status updates.
• Create and regularly review Individual Development Plans for every direct report.
• Build genuine psychological safety — a team where people raise problems early and learn from mistakes.
• Spot performance concerns early and address them with clarity and care.
• Identify and advocate for promotions when earned, and retain people worth keeping.
• Hire well — take an active role in interviews and set a high bar for technical and cultural fit.

Own Delivery

• Run iteration planning, manage scope, track commitments, and remove blockers before they become fires.
• Deliver predictably in six-week planning cycles, and use data to keep improving.
• Ensure operational maturity: runbooks, SLOs, on-call practices, and blameless post-mortems are part of how the team works.
• Coordinate dependencies with the Foundation Platform team and Product Engineering proactively, not reactively.

Shape the Developer Platform Roadmap

• Act as the de facto product owner: prioritise based on developer impact, gather feedback, and close the loop.
• Partner with Staff Engineers on the technical direction of CI/CD, the IDP, and developer tooling.
• Champion "Platform as a Product" — the team builds things internal engineers want to use, not things they have to use.
• Make the roadmap visible and understood across the Platform domain and product engineering.

Be a Trusted Cross-Functional Partner

• Build strong relationships with Platform and Engineering Management, Staff Engineers, Product Managers, and Product Leads.
• Communicate clearly — surface trade-offs, share context, and help stakeholders understand what the team is doing and why.
• Ensure product teams know how to adopt platform tooling and feel heard when they give feedback.

What you bring to the table

Personally

• You lead with clarity and invest deeply in your people — you understand that great management is a craft.
• You have a genuine growth mindset: you seek feedback, reflect on your impact, and want to become a better leader over time.
• You communicate clearly and adapt your message for engineers, peers, and senior stakeholders without losing substance.

Professionally

• 3+ years of infrastructure, platform, or software engineering experience — enough depth to earn your team's technical trust and shape good decisions.
• 1–3 years leading a team as an engineering manager, team lead, or equivalent, with real experience running 1:1s, managing delivery, and owning team health.
• Familiarity with CI/CD, DevOps practices, or developer tooling — deep expertise isn't required, but curiosity and the ability to learn fast are non-negotiable.
• Agile fluency — you run ceremonies that serve the team, not ceremonies that serve the process.

Nice to Have

• Experience in a SaaS scale-up or fast-growth engineering organisation.
• Hands-on exposure to GitLab CI, Argo CD, Terraform, or similar tools.
• Background managing multi-discipline teams (backend, DevOps, tooling, QA).
• Familiarity with DORA metrics or the SPACE framework for measuring developer productivity.

Our Values

• 💩 No bullshit: Big egos suck. Be open, honest and transparent. Share your mistakes openly and learn from them. Don't just talk about problems, solve them.
• 🎯 Grow & win: Be highly curious, adaptable & proactive. Embrace discomfort and change. Keep an open mindset and learn from others. You invest in our growth, so we invest in yours.
• 🎠 Have fun: Work hard, laugh harder. Not everything has to be serious. Be yourself, especially if you're the good kind of crazy. Sendcloud is an adventure, not a corporate maze, enjoy the ride.

Benefits

🧠 Brain Benefits - €2,000 learning budget · Courses, certifications & conferences · Growth in an international team

🌴 Time Benefits - 28 days of paid vacations per year · Extra day off on your birthday · Swap public holidays for meaningful ones

✈️ Sabbatical Benefits - 4 weeks fully paid every 3 years

🏡 Home Benefits - Flexible hybrid model (min. 1 day/week in office) · €500 home office budget

💪 Body Benefits - Company gym · Free lunch every Monday · Fresh fruit · Barista coffee

🚌 Travel Benefits - Monthly commuting allowance

🪑 Future Benefits - Pension scheme · Employee discount programs

🐾 Vibe Benefits - Dog-friendly office · After-hours drinks at the Sendcloud Bar