Software Engineering Manager

We're the Moonpig Group – home to Moonpig, Greetz, Red Letter Days and Buyagift – and we're on a mission to make people feel loved, celebrated and remembered.

We're looking for a Software Engineering Manager to lead our Reminders engineering team at Moonpig. This is a hands-on, hybrid role based in London or Manchester, with 1–2 days per week in the office.

Responsibilities:

• Jointly own the direction and outcomes of Reminders with Product, balancing customer and business goals with engineering opportunities, constraints and long-term technical needs.
• Build a strong Product-Engineering partnership where engineers contribute to discovery, problem definition, prioritisation, solution shaping and evaluating outcomes.
• Develop a deep understanding of the Reminders domain, including CRM-backed targeting, customer-facing full-stack experiences and opportunities to make greater use of personalisation.
• Stay hands-on and close to the technology, contributing code to Production where appropriate while enabling the team to own critical-path delivery.
• Facilitate technical discussions and collaborative engineering sessions, helping the team reach well-reasoned decisions without becoming the default decision-maker.
• Encourage healthy technical debate, drawing out different perspectives and helping the team navigate strong opinions or disagreement based on evidence and merit.
• Promote pragmatic engineering practices and simple solutions, including sensible build-versus-reuse decisions.
• Own engineering delivery across estimation, planning, sequencing, dependencies, risks and clear communication of progress, using relevant metrics to support sustainable and predictable delivery.
• Balance customer and business value with maintainability, reliability and technical quality, including sustainable management of technical debt, automated testing and appropriate technical documentation.
• Champion strong engineering practices, including collaborative programming, testing approaches such as TDD, CI/CD and production ownership.
• Ensure strong observability and operational health, with useful code-quality and Production metrics, appropriate KPIs, well-calibrated alarms and clear ownership of actions following incidents and PIRs.
• Build relationships across Moonpig and make effective use of capabilities in Data Science, CRM, platform and other engineering teams to improve personalisation, reduce complexity and manage dependencies.
• Use customer, product and engineering data, alongside experimentation where appropriate, to evaluate outcomes and identify opportunities.
• Ensure the Reminders area meets relevant privacy, data protection, security and legal requirements, working with specialists including our DPO, Legal and Security teams.
• Line manage three permanent engineers and support the effective integration of one contractor, setting clear expectations and creating a high-performing team environment.
• Coach and develop engineers through regular 1:1s, timely feedback, development plans, performance reviews and active mentoring.
• Own hiring and capability planning, identifying where the team needs to develop or add skills and capacity.
• Grow technical leadership throughout the team rather than concentrating technical authority with the Engineering Manager.
• Create an inclusive and psychologically safe engineering culture where people can challenge ideas, learn from failure, share feedback and celebrate progress.
• Represent the team with technical and non-technical stakeholders, creating clarity around priorities, decisions, risks, trade-offs and dependencies.

Requirements:

• Experience leading software engineers as an Engineering Manager or in a comparable people-leadership role.
• Strong coaching instincts, with experience helping engineers develop their judgement, autonomy and impact.
• Engineering expertise at around mid-to-senior Engineer level, with enough technical depth to contribute code and engage confidently in full-stack, cloud, architecture and operational conversations.
• Ability to flex between technical leadership and facilitation , knowing when to offer a view, when to challenge and when to create space for others.
• Strong understanding of engineering practices such as TDD, collaborative programming, automated testing, CI/CD and production ownership.

Tech Environment:

• Modern backend and full-stack software development, with Node.js/TypeScript and C#/.NET used within Moonpig.
• React, GraphQL and .NET Core across our wider web and API environment.
• AWS and serverless cloud technologies.
• Terraform for infrastructure as code.
• GitHub/GitLab and CI/CD.
• Grafana, AWS CloudWatch and other observability and monitoring tooling.