Engineering Manager

Strong Engineering Manager / Lead Profiles

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Mandatory (Experience 1) – Must have minimum 8+ years of overall Software Engineering / Development experience with a strong IC foundation.

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Mandatory (Experience 2) – Must have 2+ years of formal Engineering Manager experience with direct people-management responsibility (informal Senior Engineer / Tech Lead experience managing a team does not count)

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Mandatory (Experience 3) – Must have directly managed 4–6+ engineers, including 1:1s, performance management, growth plans, promotions, mentoring, and team development.

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Mandatory (Experience 4) – Must own technical direction and delivery for an engineering team/pod, including architecture, system design, code/PR reviews, execution planning, and engineering quality.

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Mandatory (Experience 5) – Must have strong backend/software engineering experience with hands-on technical depth in building APIs, services, integrations, and scalable systems; specific language/framework can vary.

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Mandatory (Experience 6) – Must have experience owning production operations, including on-call, incident management, debugging, and postmortems for their area.

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Mandatory (Experience 7) – Must have experience driving cross-functional alignment with Product and Design and translating ambiguous business/product requirements into scalable technical solutions.

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Mandatory (Company) – Must be from a Product Company / Startup, particularly B2B SaaS, Fintech, Payments, or similar technology product environments. (Refer Target Company List)

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Mandatory (Role Fit) – Role is 80% people/team management and 20% technical/IC involvement;

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Preferred (Education) - Tier 1 engineering college

We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Lead who can own backend engineering, DevOps, and delivery management.

This is not a coordination-only role. You will contribute technically while establishing the processes, accountability, and

operating rhythm needed for predictable delivery. You will manage multiple engineers and effectively use AI coding

agents and automation tools to improve the team's output without compromising quality.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, development, deployment, and reliability of our backend systems.

• Lead engineers through clear goals, task breakdowns, ownership, reviews, and regular feedback.

• Establish a process-oriented delivery system covering planning, estimation, execution, testing, release, and

retrospectives.

• Translate product requirements into technical plans, milestones, dependencies, and measurable deliverables.

• Track execution proactively, identify delivery risks early, and communicate status clearly.

• Remain hands-on with critical development, debugging, architecture, code reviews, and production issues.

• Own CI/CD, infrastructure, observability, deployment practices, and operational readiness.

• Improve engineering quality through coding standards, automated testing, documentation, and review processes.

• Delegate work effectively across team members according to their strengths and development needs.

• Use AI coding agents and engineering automation to parallelise suitable work, while reviewing and validating all

outputs.

• Build a culture of accountability in which work has clear owners, acceptance criteria, deadlines, and definitions of

done.

• Collaborate closely with product and business stakeholders to balance speed, scope, quality, and technical debt.

What We Are Looking For

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience.

• At least 2 years of experience leading or managing an engineering team.

• Strong hands-on backend development experience with modern backend technologies and frameworks.

• Practical experience with cloud infrastructure, DevOps, CI/CD, containers, monitoring, and production operations.

• Experience working in a mature, process-oriented engineering environment.

• Demonstrated ability to improve delivery predictability and engineering throughput.

• Strong understanding of agile planning, estimation, sprint execution, incident management, and retrospectives.

• Ability to manage multiple people and concurrent streams of work.• Experience reviewing architecture, pull requests, test plans, and production-readiness requirements.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

• Ability to give direct, constructive feedback and hold team members accountable.

• Sound judgement about when to build, delegate, automate, or reduce scope.

AI-Assisted Engineering

The ideal candidate should be comfortable incorporating AI into the software-development lifecycle. This includes:

• Breaking work into tasks that can be delegated safely to coding agents.

• Running multiple human and agent-led workstreams concurrently.

• Providing agents with clear context, constraints, and acceptance criteria.

• Reviewing generated code for correctness, security, maintainability, and architectural fit.

• Using automation to accelerate testing, documentation, refactoring, and operational workflows.

• Measuring whether AI tooling produces genuine delivery improvements.

We do not expect blind reliance on generated output. The Engineering Lead remains accountable for the quality and

correctness of everything shipped by the team.

Success in the First 90 Days

• Understand the existing architecture, infrastructure, team capabilities, and delivery bottlenecks.

• Take ownership of backend and DevOps execution.

• Introduce a consistent planning, tracking, review, and release cadence.

• Establish visibility into ownership, progress, dependencies, and delivery risks.

• Improve CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and production-readiness practices.

• Create an effective delegation model across engineers and AI agents.

• Deliver at least one meaningful product or platform milestone predictably from planning through production.

Nice to Have

• Experience scaling an early-stage or growing engineering team.

• Experience hiring, mentoring, and performance-managing engineers.

• Experience with infrastructure as code, security practices, and cloud-cost optimisation.

• Experience managing migrations, reliability improvements, or legacy-system modernisation.

• Previous experience introducing AI-assisted development workflows into an engineering team.

Celeco Labs is hiring a hands-on Head of Engineering on behalf of a confidential client in the housing-finance sector.

This is a role for an engineer who wants to own delivery, not only manage it. You will set the technical direction, build and maintain production systems, and work closely with the business team. You should be comfortable taking a requirement from the first discussion through technical planning, implementation, release, and production support.

What you will do

• Own the engineering roadmap and help decide what should be built first.

• Design, build, and maintain reliable customer-facing products and internal systems.

• Write production code and review code written by others.

• Turn business requirements into clear technical plans and releases.

• Choose practical architecture, tools, and vendors that fit the company's needs.

• Set working standards for testing, deployment, monitoring, backups, and access control.

• Protect customer and company data through practical security controls.

• Investigate production issues and make sure the same problems do not repeat.

• Help hire and guide a small engineering team as the company grows.

What we are looking for

• 3–5 years of professional software-engineering experience.

• Experience building and running production systems.

• Strong backend skills, including APIs, databases, and cloud services.

• Enough frontend knowledge to work across a product when needed.

• Good judgment about system design, security, reliability, and cost.

• The ability to explain technical choices in simple language.

• Comfort working independently and taking full ownership of delivery.

Experience in lending, housing finance, fintech, or another regulated industry is useful, but not required. Experience leading engineers or working directly with founders and business leaders is also useful.

How to apply

Please share your CV or LinkedIn profile and two short examples of production systems you have owned. This is a confidential search. More information about the company will be shared with shortlisted candidates during the interview process.