Senior Engineering Manager

Senior Engineering Manager

D2C Domain — World of Books

Pécs, Hungary (Remote-friendly) | Reports to: VP of Engineering

About World of Books

We are World of Books, the UK's largest second-hand book retailer and a B Corporation at the heart of the circular economy. We rescue over 35 million books a year from landfill, giving them a new life through our own website, mobile app, and global marketplaces. With 60+ engineers based in Hungary, and product and leadership teams across the UK and US, we build tech that scales globally while doing good for the planet.

The Opportunity

Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) is our most customer-facing and commercially critical engineering domain - the growth engine of the business. It encompasses worldofbooks.com (our primary eCommerce storefront), the WOB mobile app (iOS & Android), and the platforms that power catalogue, inventory, pricing and orders.

As we continue to scale our D2C business, we are creating a new Senior Engineering Manager role to strengthen technical leadership across the domain and continue to raise the bar for technical execution.

The domain is run by a single cross-functional team with end-to-end ownership of D2C delivery — frontend, CRO and customer experience through to backend middleware, Shopify integration, and data synchronisation. The team includes strong engineering talent, including Staff Engineers and Senior Engineers, but the increasing scale, complexity and commercial importance of the domain now requires dedicated senior engineering leadership across the whole area.

You will report directly to the VP of Engineering and sit in the Product & Engineering leadership team alongside the Chief Product & Technology Officer, Director of Architecture, Director of Product and Product Managers.

This is a high-ownership, high-visibility role with significant influence over the future of our customer-facing technology.

What You Will Own

Strategic Leadership

• Set and execute the 6–12-month engineering strategy for the D2C domain, aligned with our commercial growth targets and eCommerce vision.
• Partner with the Lead Product Manager and key business stakeholders (Trading Managers, Head of Brand, Chief Commercial Officer) to shape the roadmap and translate business goals into engineering direction.
• Own the balance between new feature delivery, platform reliability, technical debt, and engineering quality using our Balance Framework as your operating model.
• Drive cross-functional alignment across Pricing, Data Platform, Supply, and DevOps, whose work directly intersects D2C.

Team Leadership & People Development

• Lead a cross-functional team (~6 engineers), working in close partnership with Staff Engineers and Tech Leads to ensure strong technical leadership and effective day-to-day delivery
• Build strong, autonomous teams by setting clear expectations, coaching engineers and technical leaders, addressing performance issues early and ensuring individuals have the support and stretch opportunities needed to grow.
• Build and maintain a high-bar engineering culture where teams take ownership, challenge ideas openly, learn quickly from mistakes and hold each other to high technical standards.
• Play an active role in senior hiring across the engineering function, ensuring every hire strengthens the organization and increases our overall talent capability.

Delivery Excellence

• Hold the domain accountable to engineering quality: observability, reliability (SLOs / MTTx targets), test coverage, and incident response.
• Drive meaningful OKR delivery: e.g., site conversion uplift, checkout abandonment reduction, 100% service instrumentation — the real commercial metrics the business cares about.
• Ensure the team operates with the right operational cadences: sprint ceremonies, ADR processes, engineering maturity reviews, without unnecessary process overhead.
• Oversee the Shopify ecosystem, Mercuron middleware, Algolia search integration, mobile app delivery, and third-party supplier integrations (Ingram, Gardners).
• Drive step function improvements in AI adoption and set strategic direction towards AI-first transition.

Technical Accountability

• Partner with Staff Engineers and the Director of Architecture to ensure technical health, architectural alignment, and forward-looking technical strategy in the D2C stack (Java/Spring Boot, Next.js/React, Kotlin/Swift, GCP, Pulsar event streaming, Grafana/Open Telemetry).
• Hold teams accountable to WOB's Architecture Decision Record (ADR) process and the Lean Tech Stack standards.
• Review overall system health; require and act on regular health reviews, key metrics, and test strategy assessments.

What We're Looking For

Essential

• Proven experience as an Engineering Manager (5+ years) with a track record of leading multiple teams or squads in a fast-paced product environment.
• Experience building and scaling consumer-facing digital products (eCommerce, web/mobile platforms or B2C SaaS) with a strong understanding of customer experience, conversion and growth metrics
• Demonstrated ability to operate with high autonomy: setting strategy, driving outcomes across 6–12-month horizons, and influencing across product, technology and commercial teams.
• Strong people leadership: developing engineers and managers, managing performance and building high-performing teams.
• Commercially sharp: able to connect engineering decisions to business outcomes and communicate effectively with product, commercial, and C-level stakeholders.
• Experience of eCommerce platforms (Shopify or equivalent) and the technical complexity of running large-scale, business critical integrations for catalogue, inventory, and order management systems.
• Technical credibility: able to review architectural decisions, challenge trade-offs, guide technical direction and hold teams accountable for engineering quality.
• Hands-on experience leading teams through the adoption of AI-first engineering practices and embedding AI tooling into development workflows to improve velocity, quality or developer experience.

Highly Valued but not essential

• Experience driving end-to-end engineering transformation, acting as the change agent rather than sponsor: defining operating models, building organizational buy-in and embedding new ways of working. Especially valuable if this includes moving teams toward AI-first development practices at scale.
• Experience managing or mentoring other Engineering Managers.
• Background in Shopify Plus, headless eCommerce, or composable commerce architectures.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pulsar, or similar) and microservices at scale.
• Experience building and running mobile engineering delivery (native iOS/Android).
• Strong understanding of observability, SLOs, and engineering maturity frameworks.
• Experience in a high-growth scale-up environment; comfortable with ambiguity and fast change.

What You'll Get

• A senior seat at the table, reporting to the VP of Engineering with real influence on WOB's D2C direction.
• A strong, motivated team: passionate engineers, good Staff Engineer coverage, and a collaborative product partnership.
• Competitive compensation package with participation in our annual management bonus scheme.
• Remote-friendly working with occasional team meet-ups; HQ in Pécs, Hungary.
• Flexible working hours, 2 days of extra holiday, Health Fund (Egészségpénztári kártya), 15 days of sick leave topped up to 100%.
• A mission you can be proud of: every book sold keeps something out of landfill.

How We Hire

We run a structured, respectful process. You won't be asked to do unpaid take-home work. Our process typically includes:

Round 1: Screening call with VP of Engineering & People Partner (60 min) — chemistry, motivations, high-level fit

Round 2: Leadership & Strategy deep-dive (90 min) — structured behavioral + situational interview

Round 3: Case study panel interview — short written brief, panel discussion with Product, Engineering & People

World of Books is an equal opportunity employer.

We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.