Engineering Manager, Platform

Conduit is a Series B B2B SaaS company making cross-border trade compliance painless for logistics operators across Europe and North America. Their platform automates customs declarations, tariff classification, and regulatory reporting for over 400 enterprise customers — processing £12 billion in declared goods value annually.

The company has grown from 40 to 210 employees in the last 18 months, with engineering now at 65 people across six squads. The Platform team is the backbone: they own the developer experience, CI/CD infrastructure, observability stack, and the internal platform services that every product squad depends on.

As Engineering Manager, Platform, you'll lead a team of 7 engineers (4 senior, 2 mid, 1 junior) responsible for keeping Conduit's engineering organisation fast, reliable, and happy. This is a hands-on leadership role — you'll spend roughly 30% of your time in code and architecture, and 70% on people, process, and cross-team coordination.

The stack: TypeScript and Go services on GCP (GKE), Terraform for infrastructure, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, Datadog for observability, and a custom internal developer portal built on Backstage. The team is currently migrating from a monorepo to a federated module system — you'll own the technical strategy for this transition.

This is an on-site role at Conduit's Edinburgh New Town office. The company offers a strong base, share options with a 4-year vest, 35 days holiday, private healthcare, and a £2,500 annual conference budget.

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 7 platform engineers — running 1:1s, setting development goals, and creating a culture of ownership and psychological safety
• Own the technical roadmap for Conduit's internal developer platform — balancing long-term infrastructure investments with the immediate needs of product squads
• Drive the monorepo-to-federated-modules migration, defining the architecture, rollout plan, and success metrics in collaboration with Staff Engineers
• Manage and improve the CI/CD pipeline — current median build time is 14 minutes, target is under 5 minutes within 6 months
• Establish and maintain platform SLOs — developer environment uptime, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery
• Partner with Security and Compliance to ensure the platform meets SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 requirements without creating developer friction
• Represent platform engineering in cross-functional planning — communicating capacity, trade-offs, and dependencies to engineering leadership and product management
• Contribute directly to architecture decisions and code reviews — this is not a clipboard-management role

Essential

• 3+ years of engineering management experience, ideally leading platform, infrastructure, or DevOps teams of 5–10 people
• Strong technical background — you've been a senior or staff engineer and can still read, review, and occasionally write production code
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure — Kubernetes, Terraform, and at least one major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, or Azure)
• Proven ability to manage a technical roadmap — prioritising work, saying no, and communicating trade-offs to stakeholders
• Deep understanding of CI/CD best practices, developer experience tooling, and internal platform design
• Excellent people skills — you genuinely enjoy coaching engineers, navigating conflict, and building team culture
• Experience working in a scaling engineering organisation (50–300 engineers) where processes are still being figured out

Nice to Have

• Experience with Backstage or similar internal developer portals
• Background in B2B SaaS, logistics, or regulated industries
• Familiarity with TypeScript and Go — the team's primary languages
• Experience leading a monorepo migration or similar large-scale infrastructure transition
• SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliance experience from a platform/infrastructure perspective