Engineering Manager

THE ROLE

Established in 1744, Sotheby’s is the world’s premier destination for art and luxury. The engineering that powers it today reflects that same ambition, built on modern technologies and modern practices.

The Engineering Manager will play a critical role in leading the technical delivery of a new platform initiative, owning engineering execution from concept through launch. This individual will partner closely with product, design, and cross-functional stakeholders to translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions, define engineering priorities, and drive delivery across multiple workstreams. The role requires a hands-on leader who can navigate ambiguity, build and mentor high-performing teams, establish strong engineering processes, and ensure the successful delivery of a premium product on an ambitious timeline. The ideal candidate is a pragmatic, detail-oriented operator with a track record of managing complex software development efforts, balancing technical excellence with execution, and fostering collaboration in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.

We’re looking for engineering managers who can build and lead the team that owns this system. People who care as much about the engineers they work with as the software those engineers produce, and who are curious enough to learn a domain that will surprise them.

Our engineering teams are globally distributed. We’re not async-only. There are regular calls, cross-team meetings, and plenty of direct collaboration alongside the written communication you’d expect from a distributed organisation. The balance works because the people here are good at both.

IDEAL EXPERIENCE & COMPETENCIES

You’ve done this before. 3+ years managing teams of five or more engineers. You’ve hired, developed and retained good people. You know what a healthy team looks like and you know how to get there when it isn’t.

You have real technical depth. You don’t need to write code every day, but you can engage credibly with architectural decisions, review trade-offs, and spot when something is going sideways before it becomes an incident. Your engineers trust your judgment because you’ve earned it.

You deliver through others. You’re measured by what your team ships, not what you build yourself. You care about outcomes, not activity.

You communicate clearly and adapt to your audience. Whether that’s giving context to your team, presenting a plan to leadership, writing up a post-mortem, or navigating a difficult conversation with a direct report. You’re comfortable in all of those.

You create clarity in ambiguity. Priorities shift, dependencies tangle, and plans change. You’re the kind of leader who absorbs that complexity and gives your team something they can actually act on.

Required:

• Proven engineering management experience with distributed teams across multiple time zones
• A strong technical background in software engineering, with enough depth to guide architectural and infrastructure decisions
• Experience taking at least one 0-to-1 product to launch, ideally at an early-stage startup
• Comfortable working against a fixed launch date across several parallel workstreams with a small, senior team and limited resources
• Comfortable working on a confidential, pre-announcement initiative and keeping discretion outside the immediate team
• Experience partnering with product management to define priorities and deliver meaningful outcomes
• Track record of hiring well, onboarding effectively, and building teams that retain good people
• A focus on engineering quality: observability, analytics and reporting, testing practices, and ensuring the team ships work they can stand behind
• Lead the engineering build of a new platform from the ground up, with experience taking at least one 0-to-1 product from first architecture decisions through launch, ideally at an early-stage startup.

Useful:

• Familiarity with our core stack: Go, Scala, React/TypeScript, Next.js, GraphQL, gRPC
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Background in real-time, event-driven, or high-value transaction systems
• Experience establishing engineering standards, governance, or communities of practice
• E-commerce, marketplace, or auction domain experience

RESPONSIBLITIES

• Own the health, output and growth of an engineering team distributed across time zones, from hiring through to career development and performance
• Partner with product management to shape your team’s roadmap, balancing feature delivery, technical investment and operational health
• Set and maintain the quality bar for your team’s area of the platform, including engineering practices, observability, reliability and how work gets reviewed
• Run the delivery cadence: planning, prioritisation, retrospectives, and the day-to-day work of keeping things moving and unblocked
• Manage dependencies and communication across teams, reducing coordination overhead and making sure nothing falls between the cracks
• Contribute to engineering-wide initiatives, whether that’s standards, tooling, process improvement, or how we grow engineers across the organisation
• Handle incidents and operational issues alongside your team, own the follow-up, and make sure the right things get fixed
• Give your engineers regular, honest feedback and create real opportunities for them to grow
• Lead the engineering build of a new platform from the ground up, from the first architecture decisions through launch.
• Develop and maintain a build, buy or hybrid view for each platform domain, and manage third-party vendors and integrations behind a controlled interface layer.
• Turn ambiguity into a scoped technical plan, raising risks and trade-offs early with clear recommendations.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Competitive salary with discretionary bonus
• Private health insurance
• Health cash plan and dental insurance
• Workplace nursery benefit
• Generous holiday allowance, Christmas shutdown, summer Fridays, and volunteer and wellbeing days
• Great hardware
• Cycle to work scheme and eye care vouchers
• Regular social events, meetups, and use of our London space (the summer and Christmas parties are worth showing up for)