Engineering Manager

The role and the team 
Engineering Managers at giffgaff are at the heart of growing our people and teams 
towards high performance. As an EM you will look after one of the teams responsible for 
building and supporting our most successful products in the mobile space. The code your 
team writes will impact some of the most public-facing areas, with your changes being 
highly visible to our members (that’s what we call our lovely customers). It’s one of those 
roles where it’s very easy to explain what you do to your friends and family - just open the 
giffgaff website and show them!  

We are looking for people that want to play a major role in tech that impacts over 4 million 
people, making a difference in how they communicate, stay connected, and talk to their loved ones and friends. Plus, help us launch our big ideas that are once again ready to 
disrupt the industry in true giffgaff style! 

Focus: team’s & people’s success. 
Scope: 1-2 teams (depending on your experience and the size of the teams). 
Span: 6-12 direct reports (technical contributors, typically software engineers of any level 
between Junior Eng and Engineering Lead). Can be a mix of permanent and external staff. 
Reports to: Lead Engineering Manager / Director of Eng. 

Measures of success:

 - The team(s) delivers impactful outcomes, in a timely manner, and continuously 
improves.

• People are engaged, highly motivated, and make regular progress in their personal 
  development.
• - Work produced by the team is of high technical quality, and advances the 
  technical strategy. 
  Key responsibilities 
  Managing teams - Accountable for the team's outcomes and team's delivery; partners with PM to 
  make plans and drive delivery.
• - Ensures day-to-day activities are running smoothly; notices impediments/blockers 
  and intervenes.
• - Is the voice of the team in various forums and meetings, ensuring the team’s point 
  of view is best represented with stakeholders.
• - Leads the team towards high performance, creating a psychologically safe 
  environment and promoting an experimental mindset. 
• 
  Managing people
• - Responsible for people's success, engagement, progression.
• - Hires and onboards new team members. 
  Technical strategy
• - Accountable for the quality of the team’s output.
• - Ensures work is prioritised to make progress towards the team and giffgaff’s 
  technical strategy. 
  Leading change
• - Depending on experience, you can take the lead on initiatives that you’re 
  passionate about to improve things across all teams (some recent examples: 
  improving our career progression framework; improving our learning & 
  development process; updating our tech radar). 
• 
  Skills, experience and attitudes : 
  Experience: 2+ years of experience of managing teams and people. 
  Soft Skills: team management; delivery; agile; people management; recruitment. 
  Technical skills: system design; event-driven architecture; TDD; pair programming. 
• 
  This role is not hands-on. We don’t expect you to write code, or at least not on a regular basis (if you choose to do so every now and then, that’s fine). We do however expect you to be technical enough to have credibility with engineers and to appreciate and 
  champion best practices like TDD and Pairing. Also, expect to often find yourself in technical discussions on architecture, solutions, tooling, processes, etc.