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carwow is one of Europe's largest online car-changing destinations, combining technology, media, and automotive expertise. The company grew over 50% last year with nearly £3bn in cars bought on site. In 2024, carwow acquired Autovia (creators of AutoExpress and Evo magazines), doubling its audience. The company now operates one of the world's largest YouTube channels with almost 10 million subscribers, 1.1 billion annual views, sells 1.2 million print magazine copies, and reaches over 350 million people annually through web content.
As Technical Engineering Manager, you will co-own the roadmap with your Product Manager counterpart, balancing delivery, quality, and technical health as genuine equals. You'll manage one engineering team, reporting to the Head of Engineering or Director of Engineering.
Key responsibilities include:
- Co-owning the roadmap with your Product Manager, with specific ownership of delivery health, predictability, throughput, and quality of shipped work
- Holding technical accountability by default, including ownership of technical quality, architecture, and SLOs
- Staying close to the codebase to make informed decisions on technical trade-offs, risk, and quality
- Reading code, reviewing pull requests, and pair-programming regularly to maintain technical quality and mentor engineers
- Managing, coaching, and developing engineers on your team; owning hiring from sourcing through close
- Setting and tracking team-level goals in partnership with direct reports
- Owning team budget, including software spend and headcount planning
- Owning SLOs and operational health for systems your team is responsible for
- Driving adoption of AI tooling and practices within your team
Success in the role means your team ships predictably with clear technical trade-off discussions, engineers are growing and well-supported with clarity on performance, and roadmap decisions hold up because you and your PM are genuinely aligned.
Benefits include hybrid working, competitive salary, matched pension contributions, share options, Vitality Private Healthcare with eyecare vouchers, life assurance, monthly coaching sessions with Spill, enhanced holiday package (28 days annual leave plus additional days at 3rd and 10th anniversaries, option to buy 3 extra days, 1 day for wedding, 1 day for moving house), ability to work abroad for a month, inclusive parental and fertility policies, childcare support, latest tech (MacBook or Surface), up to £500/€550 home office allowance, generous learning and development budget, regular social events, and referral bonuses.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Previous experience managing engineers, ideally within a product-led organisation
- Ability to read and understand code across the team's primary stack
- Ability to pair-programme effectively with engineers on real work
- Ability to review pull requests with meaningful, technically credible feedback
- Track record of owning delivery outcomes, not just team happiness and process
- Comfort holding both the people and technical threads of a team simultaneously
- Experience or real enthusiasm for hiring, budget ownership, and operational metrics like SLOs
