Engineering Manager, Kaizo

• You don’t just “run standups” — you build healthy teams that ship
• You notice tensions early, create clarity, and turn chaos into rhythm
• You care about people first, process second, and tech third — and you’re strong enough to hold that line
• Experience as Senior Engineer / Tech Lead / Engineering Manager in SaaS B2B
• Proof you can build team health: 1:1 systems, reviews, growth paths, tough conversations
• Ownership of delivery rituals: releases, incidents, retros, metrics → real improvements
• Strong cross-functional comms; you can reduce friction between Product, Commercial, and Engineering
• Pragmatic, data-driven decision-making; you measure, adjust, and move

Desirable

• This is Kaizo’s first-ever Engineering Manager. Until now, engineers and leadership have juggled hiring, 1:1s, performance talks, release rituals, incident handling, and cross-team comms on top of delivery. It worked when we were tiny. It won’t as we scale
• You’ll take responsibility for a 13-person engineering group (FE/BE/AI/QA)
• They’re talented, hungry, and doing great work — but they need someone who can create structure, hold the pulse of the team, and make sure we scale without losing momentum
• Your mission: own team health and operational excellence so engineering stays fast and sustainable
• You’ll be the central point for people leadership, delivery rituals, and continuous improvement. You’ll partner closely with our senior/principal engineers on architecture and technical direction, while you own the operating system of the org: cadence, communication, metrics, and accountability
• This role is intentionally people & process–heavy (think ~70/20/10: people/process/tech)
• Your “plus-one” could be QA, SRE/Platform, Security, or a similar operational discipline — something you can drive when the fires are out and the flywheel’s spinning
• And yes, this is all inside an AI-native, product-led SaaS where reliability and quality matter
• You’ll support and enable a ~13-person engineering group across FE/BE/AI/QA — keeping them aligned, motivated, and moving in the same direction
• Run the core people cadence: weekly/monthly check-ins, semiannual performance reviews (ISO 27001 compliant), growth plans, and PIPs when needed
• Keep a live pulse on engagement, risk of churn, and development needs across engineers
• Coach leads; make feedback normal, specific, and timely
• Own release hygiene: definitions of ready/done, release gates, and “no surprise” deploys
• Own quality & incident management: SLAs, P1/P2 playbooks, on-call, postmortems, follow-through in backlog
• Run retros end-to-end (prep → facilitation → action items → follow-up)
• Drive cross-team communication (FE/BE/AI/QA/Data) and knowledge sharing so nothing lives with “the only person who knows”
• Track delivery & reliability metrics (velocity, predictability, change failure rate, MTTR) and use them to improve, not punish
• Work with Product on planning & prioritisation; protect capacity for platform improvements alongside customer commitments
• Support talent pipelines & hiring: define roles, run first-round interviews as the team’s representative, help us land bar-raising hires
• Collaborate with principal/architects on how we scale systems; you keep the engine running while they drive the blueprint
• Plus-one Ownership (10–20%)
• Lead an area aligned to your background (e.g., QA maturity, SRE/Platform, Security, Compliance tooling) — hands-on enough to make it real
• What it’s like here:
• Fast, candid, and human
• Lightweight rituals, high trust, zero micromanagement
• You’ll be expected to bring structure and hold standards — nicely, but firmly

• Start Date: ASAP