Senior Engineering Manager

Aria is on a mission to help freelancers & SMBs manage their cashflows by helping them get paid faster We do that by providing an API that platforms such as Malt can integrate seamlessly into their product to offer invoice financing, as well as a powerful administration Dashboard.

The team

Engineering is a group of ~10 engineers (mostly backend), organised into 4-5 squads alongside 3 Product Managers, with a Platform squad led by a Staff Engineer. You'll own a scope of squads, partner with their PMs as a peer, and work with one other Engineering Manager and the CTO on how we build, ship and operate. We have a lot of exciting projects and challenges coming up, which is why we're looking for an EM to join us and have an impact from day one

What you'll do

• Own the outcomes of your squads: you are the CTO of your scope. You know the roadmap, the codebase, the stakeholders and the risks, and you take responsibility for a winning plan. No excuses
• Manage and grow engineers: 1:1s that go somewhere, direct and candid feedback all year (not once a year), clear performance expectations, and deliberate investment in your seniors becoming tech leads
• Partner with Product as a peer: co-own the roadmap, push back on weak rationale, surface the technical investments that never show up on a Gantt chart
• Deliver predictably: decompose problems, estimate honestly, flag risk early, re-plan when reality changes. You commit to dates you can defend
• Build the machine: engineering standards, review and testing practices, delivery rituals, on-call, career expectations. You introduce process where it creates leverage and remove it where it creates ceremony
• Structure the team: squad boundaries, ownership, tech leads, the way work flows from PM to production. You will help shape how Engineering is organised as we grow, not just staff the boxes
• Balance speed with the quality a lender needs: we move fast, and we also handle other people's money. You know which corners are cheap to cut and which ones end up in an audit, and you make that call explicitly rather than by accident
• Raise the operational bar: security, performance, reliability and velocity are yours to improve, with SLOs, incident hygiene and blameless post-mortems that turn into real fixes, not just docs
• Make your squads AI-operational: we are betting seriously on AI, in the product and in how we work. You will push AI-assisted development, automate the boring parts of your team's workflow, and hold the quality bar while doing it
• Stay technical: review designs and RFCs, take written positions on architecture and build-vs-buy, and get your hands dirty on prototypes, internal tooling and PRs
• Create leverageable artifacts: onboarding docs, runbooks, decision logs, well-scoped tickets, written trade-offs. Your leverage comes from what you write, not from how many meetings you attend
• Learn a lot about fintech: we are not just a SaaS provider. We lend our own money, so credit risk, traceability, auditability and the integrity of our systems are non-negotiable

Who you are

• You have solid experience managing backend or full-stack engineers, including seniors, and you have grown people from mid-level to senior and from senior to lead
• You come from a scale-up context (Series A to post Series C) and you know the difference between building the machine and operating it. You are comfortable with ambiguity, missing process, and deciding without perfect data
• You were a software engineer before you were a manager, with real backend depth. You can read our code, follow an architecture debate and disagree with substance
• You have strong architecture knowledge: distributed systems, service boundaries, data consistency, event-driven design, and the trade-offs behind each. You can tell a genuine architectural problem from a naming argument
• You have practised Domain Driven Design, not just read about it: event storming and context mapping with business stakeholders, bounded contexts that survived contact with production, aggregates and anti-corruption layers where they earned their keep. In a lending business, getting the domain right is what keeps the system understandable three years from now
• You still get your hands dirty (prototypes, internal tooling, AI agents, design and code reviews), but your deliverable is the team's output, not yours, and you are never on the critical path of a roadmap commitment
• You manage the team, you are not a member of it. You define the "what", the outcomes, the quality bar and the boundaries, and you let engineers own the "how"
• You communicate clearly in writing. You gather information informally and communicate decisions formally
• You anticipate the brittle service, the disengaged engineer and the dependency about to slip, and you build real solutions in