Engineering Manager

About Lendable

Lendable is on a mission to make consumer finance amazing: faster, cheaper and friendlier. We’re building one of the world’s leading fintech companies and are off to a strong start:

• One of the UK’s newest unicorns with a team of >300 people
• Recently expanded into the US
• Profitable since 2017
• Backed by top investors including Goldman Sachs
• Loved by customers with the best reviews in the market (4.9/5 across 10,000s of reviews)

So far, we’ve rebuilt the Big Three consumer finance products from scratch: loans, credit cards and car finance. We get money into our customers’ hands in minutes instead of days. We’re growing fast, and there’s a lot more to do: we’re going after the two biggest Western markets (UK and US) where the trillions worth of these are held by big banks with dated systems and painful processes. 

Join us if you want to

• Work in small teams of exceptional people trusted to take ownership and make decisions quickly
• Be relentlessly resourceful to solve problems and find smarter solutions than the status quo
• Build the best technology in-house, using new data sources, machine learning and AI to make machines do the heavy lifting

About the role

We are looking for two Engineering Managers - one for the original and biggest UK Product, Unsecured Loans, and one for the brand new US Loans team. 

You will be working alongside the team’s Product Manager, and closely with the Product MD and your peer Engineering Managers. For both of the roles, we have many avenues for growth and the technical input here is exciting.

Over the next 12 months (and beyond!), you will

• Support the engineers you manage in your team through 1:1s, where you will have great career coaching sessions, and support their development and growth by regularly setting goals with them. You will give them actionable feedback that helps them understand what to keep doing and what to work on

• Use your experience and knowledge of High Performing Teams to lead & support the team to become efficient at planning and shipping complex products. You will engender a Continuous Improvement mindset, and build up a track record of making significant process improvements

• Place a particular emphasis on clear, engaging and empathetic communication, and know how to get buy-in for improvements. You value different communication tools but know how to deliver your message best (In-person, slack, video, email, etc.) You champion asynchronous and remote-friendly working practices

• Use your technical background as an engineer to ask the right questions of the team - is what is being delivered scalable and robust? Does it have good monitoring? How will it be tested? You endeavour to keep your knowledge relevant and can support your team in making good choices. You will work alongside the Tech Lead. You would be expected to contribute to the technical delivery by spending up to a quarter of your time pairing with engineers to get to understand our implementation and architecture. You embrace automation and testing as core “must-haves” of every successful and lean software solution

• Encourage high levels of psychological safety and identify what changes will benefit the team through running regular health checks. You will look for new ways of increasing the skillset and team health, leading to even better outcomes

• Build a strong working relationship with the team’s Product Manager - they are responsible for the Why, and you are accountable for the How. You collaborate with business stakeholders, working with the Product Manager to deconstruct their requirements to model optimal, scalable software solutions. You will use your knowledge of Agile methodologies and ways of working along with tracking and using metrics to hold the team accountable for delivering quality on time

• You are comfortable with the pace and trade-offs of a rapidly evolving scale-up (meaning: know how to take care of yourself and your team; get your work done without burning out; prioritise relentlessly; wear different hats when needed)

• Spend around 10-20% contributing to engineering initiatives like coaching circles, knowledge sharing and guilds or things like improving the engineering hiring processes

About you (Desired)

Engineering management is a varied and changing responsibility, meaning no person or team fits a cookie-cutter template. We’re interested in the diversity of your experience leading and growing teams. Perhaps you’ve thrived in rapidly evolving companies, or maybe you’ve led teams that have cracked complex technology problems.

This means we don’t have a strict checklist of experience that we look for. However, your proven results in the following areas would make you even more suited to the role at Lendable:

• You’ve operated in a B2C Finance environment, especially in consumer credit. Whilst it’s not essential, understanding how to design, build and run a highly-available customer-facing service would help you be effective quickly.

• You’ve delivered products in an FCA (or similar) regulated environment, but you value effectively supporting customers while meeting regulatory requirements without becoming bureaucratic or process-led.

• You thrive by leading and evolving cross-functional teams. You can draw on your experience of bringing together product, design, data science, domain experts and engineers to operate as one super-effective team. You have proven skills that help the team navigate and lean into the different perspectives and priorities each function brings to the team.

• Do you like to move between more hands-off and more hands-on roles as you evolve in your career? If so, we’d love to hear about how that has helped you be more effective as an engineering manager. We value people who don’t just look to climb hierarchies but appreciate what they can learn from applying their skills to the opportunities they find.

• You have been an engineering manager with hybrid or fully-distributed teams. Despite the challenges, you understand how to support and nurture individuals to collaborate and deliver a high-performing team effectively. Why? We are rapidly evolving our mix of office-based and fully-remote staff and would love you to bring your experiences of how to make this work effectively.

The interview process

We’re not a corporate so we try our best to get things moving as quickly as possible. For this role we’d expect:

• • An introduction call with one of the leadership team (remote)

  • Technical Interview (remote)

  • People Management and Team Leadership interview (office)

  • Project and Delivery interview (office)(Meet the team you will work with daily and the wider team as well)

Life at Lendable (also check out our Glassdoor page)

• The opportunity to scale up one of the world’s most successful fintech companies.

• Best-in-class compensation including equity.

• You can work from home every Monday and Friday if you wish - on the other days, we all come together IRL to be together, build and exchange ideas.

• Our in-house chef prepares fresh, healthy lunches in the office every Tuesday-Thursday.

• We care for our Lendies' well-being both physically and mentally so we opt for the highest coverage when it comes to private health insurance

• We organise an annual trip with the whole company, to celebrate our milestones and reflect on our achievements.

• We're an equal opportunity employer and are looking to make Lendable the most inclusive and open workspace in London