Senior Software Engineering Manager

Company Description

Job Description

Senior Engineering Manager

• , you'll lead multiple engineering teams (typically 4 squads, ~20 engineers) across a single technical domain.
• You're accountable for:
• Domain-level technical strategy
• — Work with product leadership and your teams to define a 12–18 month technical vision for your domain
• Team health and growth
• — Build an environment where engineers thrive: hiring, developing ICs, mentoring junior managers, and creating psychological safety
• Delivery excellence
• — Guide your teams through discovery, planning, and execution using small-batch delivery and continuous feedback loops
• Business impact
• — Translate product objectives into technical solutions; quantify and communicate the impact of your domain's work
• Cross-functional leadership
• — Work closely with product, design, and business partners to resolve ambiguity and drive alignment
• Technical decision-making
• — Guide your teams on system design, architecture, and engineering practices while maintaining talabat's standards for scalability, security, and performance
• 90-day, 6-month, and 12-month outcomes
• 90 days:
• You've onboarded your teams, understood their technical roadmap and pain points, and delivered your first feedback to your manager on domain health and near-term priorities.
• 6 months:
• Your teams are shipping value consistently; you've identified one emerging technical leader and started mentoring them; you've coached your teams through at least one cross-domain initiative; code quality and shipping velocity are on track or improving.
• 12 months:
• Your domain has a clear technical vision communicated across the org; you've grown at least one engineer significantly (either toward IC4/Staff or toward management); your teams ship with confidence; you're contributing to 1–2 strategic initiatives beyond your domain; you're mentoring or developing a potential future manager.

Qualifications

• What you'll bring
• Leadership & people management
• 4+ years of hands-on technical leadership experience managing engineering teams
• Demonstrated ability to hire, mentor, and grow engineers — we care about your track record of developing people, not just technical skills
• Comfort with cross-functional leadership: working with product, design, business partners, and other engineering teams
• Emotional intelligence: you navigate ambiguity, handle conflict constructively, and create psychological safety for your teams
• Technical depth
• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience in production systems
• Deep understanding of
• at least one
• of: distributed systems, backend systems, data platforms, mobile platforms, or web-scale infrastructure
• Proven ability to work
• across diverse technology stacks
• — we care that you've made architecture decisions that matter, not that you've used every specific tool
• Hands-on understanding of XP practices: TDD, pair programming, continuous refactoring, and trunk-based development (or strong willingness to learn and lead talabat's approach)
• Engineering sense
• You think about non-functional requirements: scalability, reliability, latency, cost efficiency, and security — not just feature delivery
• You've navigated the tradeoffs between speed and technical debt; you know when to optimize and when to simplify
• You've led or been part of domain-level decisions (tech stack migrations, architectural changes, platform initiatives)

Nice-to-haves

• Experience leading multiple teams or a domain in a high-growth environment
• Exposure to eXtreme Programming practices (XP culture is learnable but experience is valuable)
• Background in marketplace, delivery, or logistics optimization
• Experience mentoring or developing other engineering managers
• Familiarity with modern cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Additional information
• Why this role, why talabat
• Scale with purpose:
• You'll impact millions of daily orders across MENA while building a technical foundation that's proven to scale
• Engineering culture that wor