Engineering Manager

THE ROLE

We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to play a central role in the future of our digital products and platform capabilities. You will join and lead a product engineering team responsible for building, operating, and continuously improving software that supports Sotheby’s internal and/or customer-facing experiences.

We want a leader who can be accountable for a critical delivery area while helping the team evolve and innovate. You have a passion for building practical, reusable, and resilient solutions, and you enjoy tackling hard product and engineering challenges in concert with smart people. You can take on complex problems, learn quickly, iterate, and persist toward a good solution.

You are customer-focused and care deeply about delivering tools and experiences that delight and empower users—whether those users are clients, specialists, or internal teams.

This role is open to anywhere in the UK. You can work remotely from within the UK or work in a hybrid or in-office model from our London office.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Builds and leads a product engineering team of highly skilled software engineers, creating an environment of clarity, ownership, and continuous improvement
• Delivers high-quality software outcomes across feature delivery, reliability, security, and operational excellence
• Builds, optimises, and maintains internal and/or consumer-facing tools and services
• Guides the design and build of elegant abstractions, shareable libraries, and robust APIs where reuse creates leverage
• Partners with engineers, product managers, design, and other stakeholders to test and ship features continuously
• Actively looks for ways to improve the end-to-end experience across Sotheby’s product portfolio, including reducing friction, improving performance, and raising quality
• Works closely with product managers on roadmaps, prioritisation, and stakeholder alignment, balancing new development with technical debt reduction
• Drives healthy engineering practices: planning, delivery predictability, incident response, postmortems, observability, and sustainable ways of working
• Supports cross-team collaboration by communicating clearly, aligning on interfaces/contracts, and ensuring effective ownership boundaries
• Stays close to the work through design reviews, code review practices, and hands-on problem solving when it is the most effective way to unblock progress

IDEAL EXPERIENCE & COMPETENCIES

• 8+ years of industry engineering experience in a product-driven environment, ideally 3+ years focusing on full stack application development, technologies, and platforms
• 2+ years in a people management position
• Excellent communication skills, both internally and externally
• A team player who values diverse opinions and empowers collaboration across functions and teams
• Proactive, eager to learn, highly adaptable, and comfortable dealing with ambiguity in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment
• Intrinsically driven to innovate and to take initiative when seeing a process or problem that could be improved
• Eager to learn new technologies and open to learning from others
• Proven experience writing, deploying, and running production services and/or distributed systems
• Experience in API design and building services with clear separation of concerns
• Experience with RDBMS such as Postgres or MySQL and writing migrations
• Preference for Golang experience, but any production, at-scale programming experience is great
• Working knowledge of GraphQL and gRPC is a plus
• Working knowledge and experience with Docker and Kubernetes
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP
• Working knowledge of event-driven architectures and messaging queue systems