Engineering Manager (1-year maternity cover)

📋 Description

• • Lead and inspire two cross-functional product engineering squads—Journey and Lifecycle & Marketing—totalling five engineers who are distributed across Berlin and remote locations. Your mission is to safeguard delivery momentum and nurture talent while the permanent Engineering Manager is on parental leave.
• • Own the full people-management cycle: weekly 1-to-1s, quarterly growth reviews, compensation calibration, conflict resolution, and succession planning. You will translate Ecosia’s values of equity, inclusion, and sustainability into everyday engineering practices.
• • Partner with Product Managers, Designers, Data Analysts, and Tree-Planting Operations to prioritise experiments that deepen user engagement and maximise climate impact. You will balance rapid A/B testing with long-term architectural health.
• • Champion operational excellence: define SLAs/SLOs, run blameless post-mortems, optimise CI/CD pipelines, and ensure GDPR-compliant data handling. You will keep services that synchronise user settings, chat history, and marketing touchpoints running at 99.9 % availability.
• • Translate high-level OKRs into sprint goals and measurable deliverables. You will track velocity, burn-down, and experiment success rates, adjusting scope or resources before risks become blockers.
• • Guide technical decisions without being the sole decision-maker. You will facilitate architecture reviews, pair-programming sessions, and knowledge-sharing guilds so that every engineer can reason about cloud infrastructure, Terraform modules, and event-driven systems.
• • Remove organisational friction by negotiating with Legal, Finance, and Marketing stakeholders. Whether it’s a new email provider or a cookie-consent banner, you will secure approvals and shield the team from context switching.
• • Foster a learning culture: allocate 10 % time for hack days, sponsor conference attendance, and curate an internal library of climate-tech papers. You will mentor mid-level developers toward staff-level impact and help juniors craft personal development plans.
• • Embed sustainability in code: evaluate the carbon footprint of new features, choose energy-efficient regions in GCP, and encourage green coding patterns. You will publish quarterly reports showing how engineering choices reduced CO₂ emissions.
• • Model inclusive leadership by actively recruiting diverse candidates, running bias-free interviews, and creating psychologically safe retrospectives. You will co-chair the Engineering DEI committee and track belonging metrics.
• • Contribute to Ecosia’s open-source projects and technical blog, sharing insights on scalable tree-planting verification systems, privacy-preserving analytics, and serverless architectures. Your thought leadership will attract mission-aligned talent.
• • Prepare a smooth hand-back after 12 months: document tribal knowledge, update runbooks, and create a transition plan so the returning manager can ramp up in under two weeks. Your legacy will be a happier, higher-performing team and a more resilient codebase.