(AI-First) Engineering Manager

Groupon's push and email communications reach tens of millions of customers daily, and the systems that power them are mid-transformation. The Managed Channel team owns subscription management, outbound email delivery, and the Bloomreach CDP integration that connects real-time user data to every outbound message. The Bloomreach global rollout is live, an async messaging bridge between BR and the core platform is in build, and a new event gateway architecture is on the horizon. The team has been operating without a dedicated EM for eighteen months. When this hire is in seat, the Managed Channel roadmap gets the sustained ownership it needs — and an adjacent team priority, Pricing & Promotion, gets the director bandwidth it's been waiting for.

Who you'll work with

You'll report to Nikash Ray, VP of SW Engineering. Your team is 3 engineers based in Bangalore, with Sri Hari Krishan Vuppalapati as Lead Engineer. Business stakeholders sit in Prague and London.

This role is based in Prague or Madrid. Your afternoons are the Bangalore team's mornings: that overlap window is when you make calls, unblock work, and keep priorities aligned across a significant time zone gap. If you need to be physically present with a team to build trust or maintain accountability, this setup won't work.

What you'll be doing

• Owning the Managed Channel delivery roadmap end-to-end: the Bloomreach CDP global rollout, the async BR/RAPI communication bridge, and the BR/MTA direct integration replacing the CDP-proxy layer
• Driving the long-term event gateway architecture: near-real-time ingestion of user and system events at scale, routed to third parties in a way that reduces platform cost and improves targeting precision
• Running weekly delivery reviews, making prioritization calls when ad-hoc business requests compete with platform work, and presenting trade-offs to Nikash and stakeholders in Prague and London with a clear recommendation — not a list of options
• Conducting system design and code reviews with the Bangalore team, raising the engineering bar on microservices, Kafka-based messaging patterns, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP)
• Setting and enforcing engineering practices: pull request discipline, incident response, observability standards, and AI tooling adoption (Cursor, CodeRabbit, or equivalent) that compounds team velocity over time
• Managing 8 direct reports through regular 1:1s, performance feedback, and hands-on mentorship grounded in their actual output, not reported status
• Aligning cross-team dependencies with EMs in Feeds and Coupons/Voucher Cloud, and with Marketing and Product stakeholders in Prague and London

What success looks like

Day 30: You've completed knowledge transfer with Sri Hari, understand the full Managed Channel pipeline (Push, Email, SMS, Subscription), and can run a delivery stand-up without a handhold. You've had a first 1:1 with each direct report, documented their current priorities and blockers, and have a working view of where the Bloomreach rollout stands and what done looks like.

Day 60: You own 20–40% of tasks in both the BR/RAPI async bridge and the BR/MTA direct connection — owning, not shadowing. You've proposed one AI-driven process improvement in how the team works. You have a clear picture of platform service costs and at least one hypothesis about where to cut operational overhead.

Day 90: You are the single accountable owner for Managed Channel delivery. Stakeholders in Prague and London receive proactive updates from you; they are not chasing status. You've submitted performance feedback for all direct reports and have a development plan for each one.

What this role demands

• You can read a Kafka-based distributed system architecture, identify the failure modes, and lead a technical design discussion with senior engineers — you won't write production code daily, but you need enough depth to know when a decision is wrong before it ships
• You've managed a remote engineering team across a major time zone gap before, and you know how to build trust, run effective async communication, and hold people accountable without being in the room
• You can take a commercially ambiguous prioritization problem — two competing epics, a stakeholder escalation, a production incident — present the trade-offs to a non-technical audience, and defend a recommendation under pressure
• You have hands-on experience with CDP platforms, marketing automation infrastructure, or event-driven messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent) at production scale
• You run your team's engineering practices actively: you're in the PRs, you drive post-mortems, and you use AI coding tools as a force multiplier for your team's output
• Your written communication is precise and timely: your project updates, Slack messages, and stakeholder briefs are specific enough to act on without a follow-up call

How we operate

• Extreme Ownership. There is one owner for Managed Channel delivery: you. When something goes wrong in production, when a stakeholder is misaligned, when a direct report is stuck — accountability lands with you, not the team or the process.
• Speed Over Comfort. The Bloomreach rollout is live. The async bridge is mid-build. Ad-hoc business requests arrive every week. You will make decisions before all the information is in, and you will move rather than wait for certainty.
• Impact Obsessed. This team sits at the top of the purchase funnel. Outages here degrade campaign ROI and create downstream revenue risk. Engagement rates, subscriber growth, and platform cost tell you whether what you're doing is working — you track them because they're your signal, not your reporting obligation.

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