Senior Engineering Manager (hands-on)

Cărturești is Romania's leading bookstore and cultural retail chain: around 60 bookstores, carturesti.ro, a warehouse operation and a mobile app plus several internal systems and applications. One shared engineering team builds and runs the technology behind all of it, for seven business value streams.

We're looking for the engineering manager who runs that team, hands-on. You personally own the day-to-day run: releases, incidents, on-call, delivery tracking and engineering reporting. There is no management layer between you and the work, and you report directly to the CTO.

What you'll do

• Lead about a dozen people across development, QA, infrastructure & DevOps, data and mobile: hiring, one-to-ones, development plans, performance and a simple career framework
• Own release and change management, CI/CD standards on Gitea Actions, environments and observability
• Run incident management: severity model, on-call rota, runbooks and blame-free post-incident reviews. Prepare peak seasons with a change calendar and freeze
• Set the delivery standard across the seven streams: cadence, Definition of Ready and Done, flow metrics. Product Owners run their own ceremonies; you coordinate across streams and join their planning and reviews where needed
• Track the effort and cost of development work, and report delivery, effort and cost to the CTO, Finance, HR and the board
• Hold a voting seat on the Architecture Board and coordinate its work; act as technical project manager on cross-cutting initiatives when needed

The environment

A PHP / MariaDB eCommerce Platform and a Flutter app built in-house, integrated with a .NET / MS-SQL ERP, POS and HR stack, a warehouse system and ANAF's fiscal systems. Mixed Windows and Linux, mostly on-premise, managed with Ansible; Gitea, Prometheus, Grafana and Loki; Kubernetes. Parts of the run are still manual. Taking them to pipelines is the job, and we'll walk you through the gaps honestly in the interview.

What you bring

• Line management of an engineering team of eight or more, including hiring and difficult performance conversations
• Ownership of production operations for a customer-facing system: releases, incidents, on-call, post-incident reviews
• Hands-on grounding in CI/CD and observability, enough to set standards engineers respect
• Delivery leadership across several teams with Scrum, Kanban or a mix, without micromanaging
• Enough technical depth to judge design and code risk in PHP and in .NET / MS-SQL
• Effort, cost and delivery reporting that Finance and the board can rely on
• The standing to say no to Product Owners and business stakeholders, with reasons
• Romanian and English at professional level

Nice to have: retail or eCommerce with peak trading; ERP or POS environments; having introduced version control, automated testing or CI/CD where there was none; Ansible, containers, Kubernetes; DORA metrics. GitHub Actions experience transfers directly.

We assess capability, however you acquired it. No specific degree and no previous "Head of" title needed. If you meet most of the requirements, apply.

What we offer:

• Real ownership and a direct line to the CTO;

• Hybrid work schedule in Bucharest, on-site at the datacenter and in stores when needed;

• A company built around books and culture;

• Competitive salary, based on experience;

• Meal, gift, and cultural vouchers (in accordance with current legislation);

• Transportation allowance;

• Private medical insurance;

• Flexible benefits budget via the Benefit platform;

• Day off on your birthday and additional paid leave based on company tenure;

• Employee discount on all Cărturești purchases.