Flexa
carwow • London, United Kingdom

Software Engineering Manager (Product)

Employment type:  Full time

3–4 days/week at home

A little flex time

Dog friendly

Job Description

carwow is looking for a Software Engineering Manager to join our Engineering team on a full time basis. We support either hybrid working or fully remote depending on your location within the UK.

About carwow

Buying or selling a car shouldn’t be difficult! That’s why here at carwow we are on a mission to change the way people buy, sell or use a car by creating the world’s best online car marketplace. We're not all petrolheads - just a highly driven (excuse the pun) scale-up with over 300 carwowers in the UK, Germany, Spain and Portugal .

Since starting our journey in 2011, we’ve grown to become one of the most trusted comparison sites with over 12 million users and a Trustpilot rating of 4.7. We are also very proud to be backed by some of Europe’s most respected technology, marketplace and automotive investors.

Working here

At carwow, we aim to create a culture where our team can thrive no matter where or how they work. With hybrid working (1-2 days in the office although more if you like), and a healthy home office budget of £500, we are also open to looking at alternative working patterns to ensure carwowers can work in a way that works best for them.

We’re also a curious bunch and benefit from a number of different training opportunities. We are big on celebrating successes, working collaboratively and have found lots of ways to stay connected as a team both virtually and in person.

With a team of over 25 different nationalities, we know a diverse and inclusive workforce creates a more innovative company. We have work to do to get us where we’d like to be, but are working hard to get there and have a number of key DE&I initiatives underway.

So, if you always aim to WOW through everything you do (check out more info about our values here), we’d love you to join us on our journey.

Why do we need Software Engineering Managers?

Software Engineering managers at carwow are the backbone of the execution, growth, and scaling of engineers and engineering teams. Next year we plan on going from 9 squads to 14 and to do that we need Engineering Managers who can help us scale and grow sustainably.

We have an immediate need for an Engineering Manager to join us and support engineers on our core Product teams who deliver consumer and commercial facing features.

However, we’re growing both our Product and Platform remit’s next year, so we’re open to hearing from people with experience supporting both Product and Platform teams.

About the role

Core

  • Support and manage 8-12 engineers across 1-2 teams — through relationship building, 1:1 coaching, goal setting and feedback.
  • Work with Product Managers and Lead Engineers to foster effective, healthy, autonomous teams.
  • Empower teams by coaching, sharing business context, translating a sense of purpose, and advocating for their needs.
  • Work with leadership to help connect the product strategy, the technical strategy, and the evolution of the org structure
  • Work with PM’s (on customer product teams) or Principal engineer and CTO (on the Platform teams) to ensure teams have ambitious goals that directly impact company OKRs
  • Help develop the hiring strategy for engineers
  • Work with the People team and other Engineering Managers on the implementation and evolution of our career progression, compensation and performance evaluation frameworks, along with other strategic initiatives.

Tactical

  • Contribute to a diverse engineering and product culture based on customer-centricity, high-quality code, data-driven decisions, technical innovation and autonomy.
  • Act as the Hiring Manager for roles in your teams – design and conduct interviews
  • Work with other Engineering Managers and Tech Leads to nurture our engineering culture and processes as we grow
  • Work directly with Product Managers and Lead Engineers to ensure teams have the people, skills and resources they need.
  • Work closely and communicate with team ambassadors and sponsoring executives.

Requirements

Please note: We know that no candidate will be the perfect match for all we've mentioned in this posting, so please apply if you feel you're close to the brief but not an exact match.

Your attributes

You may be just the right person if others have described you as…

  • An empathetic servant leader
  • Autonomous
  • Goal-oriented
  • Customer-focused

Your previous experience

  • Are comfortable managing 8–12 engineers across a couple of teams
  • Know what high performance looks like for engineers, ideally with consumer facing product teams, and have experience hiring into those roles
  • Know how to manage and set expectations with stakeholders that provide work into the teams in the absence of a product manager, particularly applicable if you’ve been supporting Platform teams.
  • Care deeply about building healthy, autonomous teams with clear objectives
  • Get satisfaction from achieving things through others – coaching and helping them grow
  • Are an authentic, empathetic relationship-builder with loads of ambition!

How we'll measure your success

We'll know you're doing a great job when we see:

  • The career growth of the people you manage
  • Happy and effective people and teams – measuring and driving specific team health metrics
  • Our Product teams setting (and regularly achieving) ambitious goals with tangible business impact
  • Really talented and passionate people being hired

We recognise that not everything an engineering manager does has concrete measurable metrics and we work closely to ensure you’re getting enough feedback both bottom-up and top-down to know if you’re doing the right things.

How can you progress at carwow?

  • You'll report to the head of engineering, who will work with you on your progression – aiming to ensure you are happy, challenged and regularly feel like you're doing great work. They'll also help you find training and development opportunities. We have built a progression framework called TOIL that will help provide direction.
  • The next most immediate available progression for EM’s at carwow is Senior Engineering Manager. You can work towards this role by developing your management skillset, cross-organisational impact and your experience growing leads, and supporting other managers.

Benefits

  • A competitive salary with equity in the company (share options)
  • 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays and Christmas Eve or an alternative religious holiday of your choice*
  • Life insurance (4 x basic salary)
  • Private pension scheme (carwow will match contributions up to 5%)
  • Private medical health insurance with Vitality
  • Free access to Sanctus mental-health coaching sessions
  • The latest core Tech (Macbook Air or PC Surface Pro)
  • Home Office budget of £500/€550
  • Salary sacrifice benefits (i.e. cycle to work), Travel Loan
  • Subsidised gym membership (50% off David Lloyds, Virgin Active and Nuffield Health)

*if you are not religious, this day will remain as Christmas Eve in conjunction with usual Christmas Bank Holidays

CSR

We are leading the change to Electric vehicles and are conscious of the impact our industry can have on the environment. We’ve already planted over 45,000 trees to date as a thank you to those who leave us a review and are extremely excited about our new partnership with ‘One Tree Planted’, which we hope will increase the number to around 60,000 trees a year.

Company benefits

Open to part-time employees
Open to compressed hours
Enhanced maternity leave
Enhanced paternity leave
Shared parental leave
Work from anywhere scheme – work anywhere for a month each year!
26 days annual leave + bank holidays
Pregnancy loss leave
Teambuilding days

The FlexScore® is the result of a rigorous 2-step verification of a company’s flexibility

First we assess the flexibility options carwow provides and then we anonymously survey a statistically significant proportion of their employees to make sure carwow is as flexible as they say they are. Our assessment is based on the six key elements of flexibility: location, hours, autonomy, benefits, role modelling and work-life balance.

We ask the hard questions so you don’t have to.

Working at carwow

Company employees

350+

Gender diversity (male:female)

Male: 64% Female: 34% Other: 2%

Office locations

London, Munich, Madrid and remotely in Portugal

Funding levels

$55 million in 2021

Hiring Countries

Germany
Portugal
Spain
United Kingdom

Awards & Achievements

Most flexible companies

Most flexible companies

Flexa100 2024
Consumer Goods

Consumer Goods

Industry awards 2023
Most flexible companies

Most flexible companies

Flexa100 2023
Retail & Ecommerce

Retail & Ecommerce

Industry awards 2022