Engineering Manager (Inbox)

Manychat is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead their Inbox product area, a core, backend-heavy, and mobile-first chat platform. This role involves owning people leadership, delivery processes, and the technical direction of a growing cross-functional team. The manager will drive business impact through high-quality engineering execution, shape the platform's technical evolution, and partner closely with Product on strategy, focusing on improving reliability, reducing architectural friction, and evolving for AI capabilities.

Must Have

• Own outcomes for the Inbox team: delivery commitments, quality, reliability, process efficiency, and team health.
• Lead and grow a cross-functional group of backend, frontend, and mobile engineers (initially 6–10 people).
• Address meaningful system challenges: improving reliability at scale, reducing architectural friction, and evolving the platform for upcoming AI capabilities.
• Guide architectural direction in partnership with senior engineers and emerging tech leads.
• Champion engineering excellence through clear SLOs, observability, dashboards, and thorough post-mortems.
• Partner closely with Product and Design to shape roadmaps, translate user needs into technical plans, estimate scope, and define realistic quarterly commitments.
• Raise the bar on execution by improving team rituals, metrics, incident response, and continuous delivery practices.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineers and emerging leaders, ensuring clear growth paths and strong performance management.
• Collaborate with peer EMs and unit leadership to align on shared platform standards, infrastructure, and technical strategy.
• Lead the team through organizational scale, evolving architecture, and changing of customer needs as the product area grows.
• Proven success leading product engineering teams at meaningful scale while maintaining strong technical credibility.
• Experience leading cross-functional teams, driving delivery excellence, technical quality, and healthy team practices.
• Deep architectural thinking in backend systems with real-time, high-throughput services and data flows.
• Fluency in at least one of PHP, Go, Python, or Node.js, with the ability to engage confidently in technical discussions.
• A track record of delivering in close partnership with Product through roadmap planning, estimation, and stakeholder management.
• Excellent people leadership across hiring, feedback, career growth, and succession planning.
• Demonstrated ability to unblock teams through hands-on investigation, rapid prototyping, and pragmatic technical decisions.

Good to Have

• Experience working on chat, messaging, or other high-load, event-driven systems.
• Exposure to third-party APIs, infrastructure, or DevOps practices.
• Understanding of native mobile application development, including common patterns and release cycle nuances.
• Background in scaling teams through restructuring or rapid headcount growth.

Perks & Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance for both you and your family.
• Professional development budget for conference tickets, online courses, and other relevant resources.
• Flexible benefits package to tailor perks that matters most for you.
• Hybrid work and generous leave options to prioritize your work-life balance.
• In-office perks, including free meals and snacks.
• Company-funded sport activities, annual offsites, and team-building events.

WHO WE ARE 🌍

Manychat is a leading Chat Marketing platform. We help businesses engage with their customers on Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Trusted by over 1 million brands in 170+ countries, we're an official Meta Business Partner, backed by top investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners.

With 350+ teammates across international offices in Barcelona, Austin, Amsterdam, São Paulo, and Yerevan — Manychat helps businesses across the globe improve their ROI and grow faster.

WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR 🌟

Engineering Manager to lead our Inbox product area: a core, backend-heavy and mobile-first chat platform that powers high-scale, real-time conversations. Inbox is a key part of how our customers interact with their audiences, enabling fast, reliable conversations that directly support user satisfaction, business success, and revenue impact across Manychat. The team is based in Barcelona, Spain.

You’ll own people leadership, delivery processes and outcomes, and the technical direction of a growing cross-functional team. You’ll act as the technical and execution leader for the Inbox product area, driving business impact through high-quality engineering execution, shaping the technical evolution of the platform through strong architectural guidance and partnering closely with Product on strategy.

This is a management-first role requiring strong architectural fluency. You won’t be expected to write code, but you will stay deeply technical through system design and architecture reviews, helping uphold high engineering standards and support the team’s technical growth.

WHAT YOU’LL DO 🧭

• Own outcomes for the Inbox team : delivery commitments, quality, reliability, process efficiency, and team health.
• Lead and grow a cross-functional group of backend, frontend, and mobile engineers (initially 6–10 people), with opportunities to expand the team as Inbox continues to scale as a strategic product area, potentially evolving toward a larger group or dedicated subteams, including AI-focused initiatives.
• Address meaningful system challenges: improving reliability at scale, reducing architectural friction, and evolving the platform for upcoming AI capabilities — to keep Inbox fast and resilient as product demands grow.
• Guide architectural direction in partnership with senior engineers and emerging tech leads, ensuring scalable and resilient system design for Inbox. In the current stage, you’ll be more hands-on in reviews and key technical decisions while the team continues to develop stronger technical leadership.
• Champion engineering excellence through clear SLOs, observability, dashboards, and thorough post-mortems.
• Partner closely with Product and Design to shape roadmaps, translate user needs into technical plans, estimate scope, and define realistic quarterly commitments.
• Raise the bar on execution by improving team rituals, metrics, incident response, and continuous delivery practices.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineers and emerging leaders, ensuring clear growth paths and strong performance management.
• Collaborate with peer EMs and unit leadership to align on shared platform standards, infrastructure, and technical strategy.
• Lead the team through organizational scale, evolving architecture, and changing of customer needs as the product area grows.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING 💥

• Proven success leading product engineering teams at meaningful scale while maintaining strong technical credibility.
• Experience leading cross-functional teams, driving delivery excellence, technical quality, and healthy team practices.
• Deep architectural thinking in backend systems with real-time, high-throughput services and data flows — even if you no longer code daily.
• Fluency in at least one of PHP, Go, Python, or Node.js, with the ability to engage confidently in technical discussions (our backend stack is primarily PHP 8.3).
• A track record of delivering in close partnership with Product through roadmap planning, estimation, and stakeholder management.
• Excellent people leadership across hiring, feedback, career growth, and succession planning.
• Demonstrated ability to unblock teams through hands-on investigation, rapid prototyping, and pragmatic technical decisions.

NICE TO HAVE ✅

• Experience working on chat, messaging, or other high-load, event-driven systems.
• Exposure to third-party APIs, infrastructure, or DevOps practices.
• Understanding of native mobile application development, including common patterns and release cycle nuances.
• Background in scaling teams through restructuring or rapid headcount growth.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE 🚀

By 3- 6 months, you’ll have built strong relationships across Product, Design, and Engineering and become a trusted partner in shaping clear, feasible quarterly plans. You’ll have strengthened Inbox’s discovery and delivery rituals, improving execution predictability and helping the team confidently meet its commitments.

The team will feel aligned and assured in the technical direction, with early architectural improvements underway and quality and reliability metrics trending upward. You’ll have developed a solid understanding of the technical landscape, identified key capability gaps, and begun mentoring emerging leaders while building momentum toward deeper collaboration with our AI team. You’ll also have contributed to headcount planning by assessing future needs and shaping how the Inbox organization grows.

WHAT WE OFFER 🤗

We care deeply about your growth, well-being, and comfort:

• 💙 Comprehensive health insurance for both you and your family.
• 📚 Professional development budget for conference tickets, online courses, and other relevant resources to help you grow.
• 🫶 Flexible benefits package to tailor perks that matters most for you.
• 🪴 Hybrid work and generous leave options to prioritize your work-life balance.
• 🍽️ In-office perks, including free meals and snacks.
• 🤝 Company-funded sport activities, annual offsites, and team-building events.

Manychat is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We do not discriminate against qualified employees or applicants because of race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, sexual preference, sexual identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, military status, or any other characteristic protected by local law or ordinance.

This commitment is also reflected through our candidate experience. If you have individual needs that may require an accommodation during the interview process, please indicate this in your application. We will do our best to provide assistance throughout your interview process to ensure you’re set up for success.

With my application, I accept the Manychat Privacy Policy_