Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. refurbed is Europe’s fastest-growing marketplace for refurbished products, and they are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead their Platform and Data Engineering teams. This role involves managing engineers, ensuring high-quality engineering outcomes, and contributing to the company's growth strategies while fostering a culture of ownership and collaboration.
Responsibilities
- Manage and support engineers across the Platform and Data Engineering teams, ensuring clear mission, healthy processes, and a productive working environment that doesn't depend on individual heroics
- Conduct regular 1:1s, mentor engineers, and support their personal and professional growth
- Build psychological safety, enable ownership, and help team members unlock their potential
- Facilitate technical discussions, architecture reviews, and design decisions to ensure reliability, scalability, and maintainability
- Ensure your teams produce high-quality engineering outcomes by promoting best practices and establishing clear quality standards
- Contribute to code reviews or smaller technical tasks when needed, while keeping your focus on team impact not hands-on development
- Ensure infrastructure and data systems can support refurbed's growth ambitions
- Identify and resolve blockers, surface risks early, and maintain a productive environment where teams can move quickly with clarity
- Contribute to company, department and squad-level planning, driving both short- and long-term infrastructure and data strategies
- Participate in hiring and team growth, building a strong bench of senior engineers across both domains
- Strengthen the engineering culture through feedback, knowledge sharing, documentation, and leading by example
- Encourage experimentation, learning, and adoption of modern tools and practices, including AI-assisted engineering tools where they deliver meaningful outcomes
- Define and track success metrics for Platform and Data Engineering, including reliability, developer experience, platform adoption, operational efficiency, and engineering effectiveness (e.g. using DORA/SPACE Framework)
Skills
- You are a senior, trusted engineering leader with 8+ years of experience managing engineers in platform, infrastructure, or data teams
- You have led teams where the customer is internal, you understand what it means to provide a service to other engineers and how to measure success in that context
- You have a proven ability to develop, mentor, and retain engineering talent, as well as manage performance with clarity and empathy
- You lead with low ego, openness, and a belief in autonomy and empowerment, where engineers take ownership and collaborate effectively
- You partner with product managers and engineering leaders to evolve Platform and Data Engineering as products
- You establish feedback loops and metrics to understand developer experience, delivery friction, and engineering effectiveness, using those insights to guide investments
- You have a strong background in cloud infrastructure, ideally GCP (GKE, Cloud Run, IAM, Cloud SQL, Cloud Logging, BigQuery), but AWS or Azure also relevant
- You have experience designing and operating Kubernetes-based environments including CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, and observability stacks
- You understand data engineering fundamentals: pipeline design, data warehouse modeling, transformation tooling, and data quality practices
- You are comfortable reviewing infrastructure-as-code, participating in architecture reviews, and guiding trade-off discussions around reliability, cost, and performance
- You have a solid understanding of backend systems, distributed architectures, and how scalable services are designed, enabling you to actively participate in architectural discussions and guide teams toward sound decisions
- You understand SQL, relational database concepts, and modern backend development practices well enough to provide context, make informed decisions, and remove ambiguity
- While you are not expected to be hands-on day to day, you feel confident reviewing high-level designs, evaluating trade-offs, and ensuring that the team ships robust, thoughtful solutions
- You thrive in environments where your team's success is measured by the success of others, you view other engineering teams as your primary stakeholders
- You build trust across teams through reliability, transparency, and clear communication of your team's roadmap, incidents, and limitations
- You influence through clarity and context rather than authority, building alignment across teams and domains
- You are skilled at understanding the needs of product squads and translating them into infrastructure priorities, developer tooling improvements, or data platform investments
- You cultivate a culture focused on ownership and reliability
- You promote modern engineering practices, clear and simple processes
- You foster transparency, feedback, and knowledge-sharing
- You reject blame culture and treat incidents as learning opportunities
- You are self-directed, aligned with objectives, and comfortable navigating ambiguity
- You are confident representing your teams across the whole organization and with company leadership
- Excellent English skills and based in Europe
- Strong background in software engineering, infrastructure, or data systems, with a strong foundation for systems thinking
- Experience with at least one major cloud provider at depth (GCP preferred; AWS or Azure also relevant)
- Background in either platform/infrastructure or data engineering at depth, with meaningful exposure to the other
Benefits
- Full autonomy over their location (we’re remote-first)
- Fully remote setting
- Possibility to work from our beautiful office in the vibrant heart of Vienna
- Feel free to bring your furry little buddy too
- We trust you to do the best job, so we don't care so much when you do it – you are able to self-organize
- Dedicated learning budget within your department to support your growth, whether it's courses, conferences, or other learning opportunities that matter to you
- Private sessions with experts for your personal growth and mental health (partner with Likeminded)
- Frequently host internal workshops
- Invited to take part in our office weeks, happening three times a year
- Chance to work side by side with your colleagues and enjoy the team-building events and on-site workshops
Company Overview