Engineering Manager

Location

While our company operates exclusively on a remote basis, you must reside and have the legal right to work in one of the following countries: the United Kingdom, Latvia, or Spain.

This is a full-time, remote position. Please note that we do not engage on a B2B or contractor basis.

About the Team

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a cross-functional team in our Product Engineering organization. Each of our engineering teams owns a product domain at Lokalise, from vision to delivery. Teams talk to customers, find out what they need, set their own goals and choose how to solve the problems that matter most.

AI is already part of how we build software at Lokalise, and it's changing what great engineering leadership looks like. We're looking for a leader who stays close to the work and understands how AI is changing speed, quality and engineers' day-to-day experience. You'll keep your teams focused on outcomes that matter to our customers and our business, not just on how much gets shipped.

For this role, you’ll lead our Editing Experience team. The team owns the tools linguists and reviewers use every day to translate, review and approve content at scale: the translation editor, the review and approval workflow, content management tools and the developer utilities that support them. Together with your Product Manager and Designer, you’ll own the team’s strategy and delivery end to end.

What You Will Do

• Lead, coach and develop your teams of Software Engineers. You'll support their career growth, run performance evaluations, contribute to compensation planning and hire engineers who raise the bar.
• Stay technically close to the work without becoming a bottleneck. You'll review key designs and pull requests, pair with engineers on tricky problems and take on contributions outside the critical path (such as tooling, prototypes or small fixes). This keeps you in touch with the codebase and your teams' daily reality while they own delivery.
• Partner with Product Managers and Designers (the Product Triad) to understand our customers deeply and take part in discovery. You'll make sure your teams work on the right problems, putting outcomes ahead of outputs.
• Connect engineering decisions to business impact. Understand how your domain contributes to customer value, retention and revenue, and use that to guide trade-offs on scope, investment and technical debt.
• Own your teams' flow of work from start to finish. Track and act on delivery and quality signals (such as cycle time, deployment frequency, change failure rate and recovery time), clear bottlenecks across planning, review, testing and release, and keep cognitive load sustainable.
• Lead your teams' move to AI-native engineering across the SDLC. Embed AI tools and agentic workflows, measure their real effect on speed, quality and how engineers experience their work, and adapt team practices so faster delivery never costs reliability or maintainability.
• Champion operational excellence. Drive reliability and quality practices, own the health of the services your teams run and step in as Incident Commander when needed.
• Own your teams' delivery: set quarterly plans, track progress against the product roadmap and help shape department-wide planning and strategy.

What You Must Have

• 3+ years of recent experience as an Engineering Manager leading software engineering teams, ideally in SaaS product companies.
• A strong software engineering background, and you're still hands-on today. You can review code and designs credibly, dig into technical issues and contribute to architecture decisions.
• Proven people leadership: hiring, onboarding, coaching, performance management and helping engineers grow into their next role.
• A strong product engineering mindset. You've partnered with Product and Design on discovery, worked directly with customers and measured success by customer and business outcomes rather than output.
• Business acumen. You understand the commercial context, can explain trade-offs in terms of impact and communicate clearly with stakeholders at all levels.
• Experience using engineering metrics and flow practices (such as DORA metrics, cycle time or WIP limits) to find bottlenecks and improve delivery, quality and team health, without turning metrics into targets.
• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development and agentic tools, both in your own work and across a team. You have a clear view of how AI changes delivery speed, code quality, review practices and cognitive load.
• Experience planning and delivering complex initiatives across several teams predictably, including managing dependencies, risks and incidents.

It's a Plus If You Have

None of these are required, and we're happy to support you as you learn them on the job.

• Experience in the localization industry or with translation workflows.
• Experience leading engineering teams at a product company during a scale-up phase.
• Experience shipping AI-powered product features, such as LLM-based features, to customers.
• Experience managing fully remote, distributed teams.
• Familiarity with developer experience or productivity frameworks, such as SPACE or DevEx.

Our Benefits

💰 Competitive salary and employee stock options.
🌍 Fully remote setup with flexible working hours.
🏢 Co-working budget — for those days you want a change from your home office.
🌴 Flexible vacation policy to recharge when you need to.
🖥️ Home office setup budget — monitor, desk, ergonomics, whatever helps you do your best work.
📚 Learning & development budget to grow your skills and career.
🏥 Health insurance to keep you covered.
🧘 Wellness allowance to support your mental and physical well-being.
🤝 Great startup culture — remote but close-knit, with regular retreats and social events to stay connected.