Location
Central London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Competitive salary

About the Role
This Engineering Manager will report to our CTO to help WalletConnect build and scale the Financial Services engineering team: the team behind the value-added services packaged on top of the WalletConnect Network, spanning DeFi access, treasury management, and security & compliance. You will lead a cross-functional squad of engineers building systems where accuracy and reliability are paramount. You will be accountable for the squad's delivery and technical outcomes: shaping the roadmap with your Product partner, maintaining a high bar for quality and velocity, and holding the team to WalletConnect's engineering standards.

We believe great engineering managers were strong engineers first and never stopped thinking like one. This is not primarily a hands-on coding role, but you will have the technical depth to input on, understand, and challenge engineering decisions, and to get hands-on (in code, reviews, or design docs) when it helps, without becoming the team's bottleneck.

Above all, you will be the person who makes the team better: hiring well, coaching honestly, mediating clearly, protecting focus, and caring about the humans doing the work.

Experience
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years managing engineers; you were a strong engineer first and are technically credible with senior ICs.
- Technical depth in building and operating distributed systems at scale; hands-on when needed, whether reviewing code, architecture, or technical documents.
- A track record of building, growing, and retaining high-performing teams, and genuinely caring about the people on them.
- Experience leading remote-first, distributed teams.
- Experience owning delivery of business-critical services where accuracy and reliability are paramount: trading, treasury, exchange, or financial infrastructure strongly preferred.
- Structured and disciplined planning: turning ambiguous goals into a predictable delivery cadence and hitting commitments.
- Pragmatic decision-making: right-sizing solutions, balancing speed and rigor deliberately, and avoiding over-engineering.
- Honest, charismatic communication and natural mediation: giving and receiving direct feedback with kindness, simplifying complex topics for non-engineers, and turning disagreement into alignment.
- Self-aware, context-aware, and coachable, with strong instincts; a self-starter motivated by quality and innovation, not just output.

About You
- You are a strong technical leader who fosters a culture of high-quality code and reliability.
- You run the squad's operating rhythm in close partnership with Product, ensuring structured, disciplined, and predictable delivery.
- You hold regular 1:1s with engineers, coaching across seniority levels with honest, kind feedback, and build meaningful career paths.
- You run fair performance reviews and address underperformance early and directly with kindness.
- You own reliability outcomes including SLOs, error budgets, alert quality, on-call rotation, and blameless incident reviews.
- You make pragmatic trade-off calls between roadmap, tech debt, and maintenance work, communicating clearly to all stakeholders.
- You align and mediate across Product, Design, other squads, and leadership, protecting the team's focus and surfacing risks early.
- You partner with People team on hiring, defining standards, running calibrated interviews, closing candidates, and owning onboarding.
- You read the room and act early on team health, delivery risk, or design drift, using data and sound judgment.

Qualifications
- Nice-to-haves include financial infrastructure domain knowledge such as CEX integrations, custody or treasury systems, onchain swaps, DeFi protocols, reconciliation, or transaction/address screening.
- Personal or professional experience with crypto/web3, including wallet usage, onchain interaction, or development in the space.
- Experience with Rust and TypeScript services on AWS, Grafana-based observability, and infrastructure-as-code.
- Experience introducing squad-level operating standards such as SLOs, error budgets, and DORA-style delivery metrics across teams.