Engineering Manager

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology.

We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more.

We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026.

Software Engineering is a key role within Thought Machine. As an engineering-focused company, we take pride in our engineering excellence, adopting best practices, and utilising modern technologies.

Thought Machine software engineers work across the stack to solve complex engineering problems that have not been solved before. As a result, while development at Thought Machine is fast-paced, you will be expected to develop code to the highest standards that scales, is secure, performant, and provides a great user experience. Software Engineers will take complete ownership of a requirement, converting it into an engineering design, task breakdown, and implementation. You'll be responsible for building both backend services and frontend experiences.

Our clients range from the world's largest financial institutions to smaller regional banks. Our systems must cater to each of these use cases, so we care deeply about providing the ability to configure and customise the user experience based on the client's or end user's persona. Software engineers are expected to bridge the gap between back-end and front-end, crafting delightful experiences that delight all our clients.

This is a full-time, permanent position based in our Lisbon office, requiring four days a week onsite.

Engineering Managers at Thought Machine lead complex technical projects to deliver on our product roadmap. To accomplish this you will manage a group of talented engineers as they identify issues and implement creative solutions to address them. You will manage your own project deliverables, contribute to product strategy and help develop and grow your team. We are particularly excited to hear from people who show strong product ownership and enjoy switching between engineering management and being hands on with technical work.

Duties

• Working with your team closely with Product Management and Client Services on defining and delivering our product roadmap.

• Actively participate in technical discussions and design reviews.

• Measuring your team’s impact.

• Contributing to product strategy.

• Contributing to engineering-wide initiatives as part of the engineering management team on anything from recruitment to team processes.

• Developing engineers in your team and help them in their career development.

• Leading by example: involvement with hands on technical work

Requirements

Essential

• 2+ years experience of engineering management of product aligned teams

• Experience of working in a cloud native environments, using modern technology stacks similar to the stack we use at Thought Machine (microservices, Kubernetes, Kafka, AWS/GCP, golang/python).

• Technical background to drive technical decisions and great interpersonal skills to drive communication with Product Managers and Client representatives. You should enjoy working in environments where you have a high level of responsibility and autonomy.

• You are comfortable wearing different Engineering Manager hats that suit the changing needs of a team as it evolves.

Desirable

• Knowledge of banking / finance.

• Interest in working on client-facing projects, conducting scoping and defining deliverables.

• You’ve previously helped recruit and shape brilliant engineering teams.

• You’ve previously taken an active role in defining and evaluating effective team processes.

• You’ve previously worked in a hypergrowth environment.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary

• Voluntary Pension Plan (match up to 5%)

• Private Healthcare Insurance

• Comprehensive Life Insurance

• 25 days holiday plus public holidays

• Two charity days a year

• Daily Meal Allowance

• Access to outstanding learning materials and courses

• Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine

• All the latest tech you need

• Huge range of healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks, smoothies and drinks

• A talented and experienced team as your colleagues

• An environment where we encourage learning and progress

We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.