Senior Engineering Manager - 9-10 month FTC

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 Senior Engineering Manager to join Moonpig on a fixed-term maternity cover contract of around 9–10 months, with availability to start in November 2026. You’ll provide people and technical leadership across teams within our Top of Funnel area, helping millions of customers navigate, discover and explore Moonpig’s product catalogue.

Responsibilities

• Lead and support engineers through regular 1:1s, coaching, timely feedback, career development and performance conversations.
• Foster an inclusive, collaborative and learning-focused engineering culture where people feel comfortable sharing ideas, challenging decisions and learning from each other.
• Partner with Product and Design to shape roadmaps and product direction, bringing an engineering perspective to discovery, prioritisation and trade-offs.
• Help engineers get involved early in discovery and problem shaping rather than Engineering operating solely as a downstream delivery function.
• Stay close to system design, architecture and technical direction, helping teams make high-quality decisions without becoming the default decision-maker.
• Encourage pragmatic technical choices that favour simplicity and make effective use of existing software and shared capabilities.
• Support Engineering Leads and teams with planning, estimation, sequencing, dependencies, risks and transparent communication around delivery.
• Balance customer and business outcomes with appropriate investment in reliability, maintainability and longer-term engineering quality.
• Champion strong engineering practices, including test-driven development and automated testing, helping teams build quality into the development process.
• Support strong operational ownership through CI/CD, observability, production support and the principle that teams own the systems they build and run.
• Help teams identify and address technical debt sustainably while maintaining appropriate technical and operational documentation.
• Build technical leadership throughout the teams, using the experience and strengths of engineers at different levels rather than concentrating technical authority in one role.
• Collaborate across Product, Design, Data/Data Science, CRM, Commercial and specialist functions where relevant, creating clarity around priorities, risks, dependencies and trade-offs.
• Support team capability planning, identifying opportunities to develop skills and strengthen engineering capability

Requirements

• Experience leading software engineering teams as an Engineering Manager, Senior Engineering Manager or in a comparable people-leadership role.
• Strong people leadership experience, including coaching, career development, feedback and performance management.
• Engineering expertise with enough technical depth to contribute credibly to full-stack and cloud system design, architecture, engineering quality and operational conversations.
• A collaborative leadership style that enables engineers and Engineering Leads to own decisions rather than relying on the manager for every answer.
• Experience building strong Product and Engineering partnerships and involving engineers in discovery, problem shaping and roadmap decisions.
• Experience sharing accountability for customer or business outcomes and translating these into clear engineering priorities.
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, including automated testing and TDD principles, CI/CD, observability and production ownership.
• Experience facilitating technical decisions, bringing the right people and evidence together and constructively challenging thinking when needed.
• Comfortable balancing feature delivery and experimentation with reliability, technical quality and sustainable engineering investment.
• Ability to collaborate and influence across disciplines while communicating technical decisions, risks and trade-offs clearly.
• Commitment to creating an inclusive environment where engineers can grow, challenge ideas, give and receive feedback and take meaningful ownership.
• Available to start in November 2026 for the fixed-term maternity cover period.

Tech Environment

Our Top of Funnel teams work across full-stack customer experiences and highly scalable cloud and distributed systems. The environment includes:

• C# / .NET and Node.js / TypeScript across modern backend and full-stack development.
• React and GraphQL within our web and API ecosystem.
• AWS, including cloud and serverless architecture.
• OpenSearch, alongside integrations with our content management, search and recommendations capabilities.
• Terraform for infrastructure as code.
• GitHub/GitLab and CI/CD practices supporting frequent, reliable delivery.
• Grafana and AWS CloudWatch for monitoring and observability.
• Automated testing and engineering practices focused on building quality into the development lifecycle.
• Production health, incident management and strong operational ownership.
• Experimentation and data-informed product development, including A/B testing and hypothesis-led approaches.
• Sustainable technical debt management and technical documentation, including architecture and operational guidance.

Benefits

• Competitive Pay & Bonuses: Plus, generous pension plans & staff discounts.
• Wellbeing First: Private healthcare (UK) and mental health support
• Flexible Working & Time Off: Generous holidays, hybrid working (1-3 days in office, depending on role/team) & up to 20 days of international working.
• Career Growth: Learning allowances, coaching & development programs.