Engineering Manager - Foundations

About Us

Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is the intelligent platform for travel and spend management. Built to tackle the time-consuming, manual work that gets in the way of real work, our tools automate everything from travel bookings to expenses, invoice processing, and more. By eliminating this shadow work that wastes hours, erodes morale, and saps innovation, we’re on a mission to power real work, with real impact.

We’re trusted by more than 10,000 companies worldwide, including Wise, On Running, Breitling, and Fabletics, and we’re tackling the 7 hours of lost productivity per employee each week, a $1.7 trillion problem http://www.perk.com/shadow-work-report.

Founded in 2015, Perk has grown into a global company of more than 1,800 people across 12 offices globally, with headquarters in London and Boston. We combine innovation, control, and simplicity to transform how businesses work and how people feel at work.

At Perk, we’re driven by our values, like being an owner, delivering a 7-star experience, and working as one team. We value curiosity, purpose, and mindset, not just knowledge, to unlock the power in your potential. Our talent team brings together leading minds from the travel and SaaS industries, representing over 70 countries. If you’re excited about having a real impact and shaping how millions of people experience work, we’d love you on the team.

Visit www.perk.com http://www.perk.com to learn more.

As an Engineering Manager for the Application Enablement team, you'll lead a group of experienced engineers responsible for building and evolving the shared infrastructure underlying Perk's web, iOS, and Android platforms within the Foundations group. You'll manage a team that works across multiple platforms and product surfaces, partnering closely with staff engineers, product teams, and cross-functional stakeholders to deliver high-impact foundational work. The team is currently focused on several strategic initiatives (including synthetic monitoring, SDLC acceleration, and a contextual notifications platform), requiring strong technical leadership, thoughtful prioritisation, and the ability to help the team execute effectively while maintaining engineering quality.

In this role, you'll help shape the technical direction of that shared infrastructure and support the team in navigating a broad, cross-cutting domain that includes design systems, mobile release pipelines, frontend tooling, and UX reliability. You'll help balance the demands of immediate delivery with long-term platform sustainability, and manage the tension between proactive foundational investment and reactive support from product teams across the business. While deep expertise in native mobile or frontend platform engineering is not a strict requirement, experience working within complex, multi-platform systems is important. Through strong people leadership, technical judgement, and operational excellence, you'll help Perk's builders ship faster and with greater confidence across every surface the product runs on.

As an Engineering Manager, you will:

• Being accountable for the delivery and personal development of your team(s)

• Acting as servant leader to your engineers and adapting your leadership style to the needs of the situation

• Taking care of individuals' performance in the organisation and supporting their journey and ownership of their career using coaching and mentoring where appropriate

• Act as a technical champion, ensuring that the team has the time and context to build systems that meet the needs and standards of our organisation

• Enabling fluent and effective collaboration within the team, and supporting them through challenges in system architecture, design or implementation

• Develop and evolve a long-term strategy and roadmap for the team, working with the Product Manager and aligned with the Tribe mission.

• Strategic team building and planning for delivering highly available features that scale with our growth

• Being a key part of the recruitment and growth of the engineering team.

• Working with the business and team metrics to deliver a 7 star experience to our customers.

• An understanding of how engineering impacts product and business needs

• Providing feedback to stakeholders within Builders (Product and Eng) and sometimes the wider business

 

AI AT PERK

AI is embedded in how we work and what we build. On the engineering side, it spans the whole workflow: our Notion, Jira, GitHub and Slack are AI-connected so you get up to speed fast, and day-to-day it helps with specifying features, writing and reviewing code, and automated AI PR review on every pull request. When something goes wrong in production, AI surfaces context across systems quickly. We also embrace agentic coding, using AI as an active collaborator, not just a prompt-by-prompt co-pilot.

We expect candidates to use AI tools in our coding interviews. The bar is understanding your code and owning what you produce. That reflects how we work every day.

 

Required skills and experience:

• You have around 5-8 years of experience managing software engineers

• For this role, we’re looking for someone who has managed (and will continue to) around 8-10 software engineers.

• You come from a technical background - ideally in software engineering, where you were a hands-on IC.

• You are a people manager who builds an effective work culture that improves the working lives of your team.

• You have experience managing larger teams where it’s necessary to build processes and systems of delegation to get work done.

• You act as a problem finder and solver technically and organisationally, helping the team to overcome any issue that prevents your engineering fellows to perform at their best.

• You run effective performance reviews that celebrate achievements and help your team identify where to grow next in line with their aspirations and the needs of the business.

• Pragmatism and obsession for simplicity, efficiency, and performance.

• You have the ability to adapt and react fast to an ever-changing environment.

• Managing AI-Driven Development: Experience with—or a strong interest in—modern AI-augmented workflows. This includes driving your team to leverage agentic workflows, develop custom agentic skills to extend AI capabilities.

How We Work

At Perk, we take an IRL-first approach to work, where our team works together in-person 3 days a week. As such, this role requires you to be based within commuting distance of our hubs. We fundamentally believe in the value of meeting in real life to improve connectivity, productivity, creativity and ultimately making us a great place to work.

For certain roles, we can help with relocation from anywhere in the world, English is the official language at the office. Please submit your resume in English if you choose to apply. Do not forget to submit an updated portfolio and/or resume.

Perk is a global company with a diverse customer base, and we want to make sure the people behind our product reflect that. We’re an equal opportunity employer, which means you’re welcome at Perk regardless of how you look, where you’re from, or anything else that makes you, well, you.

Protect Yourself from Recruitment Scams

All official communication from Perk will always come from email addresses ending in @perk.com http://perk.com or @externalperk.com http://externalperk.com, our verified social media channels, or recruiters listed on our official LinkedIn page. We will never ask you to pay for equipment, training, or fees, request sensitive personal information such as bank details early in the process, or communicate through unofficial apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. If you receive a message claiming to be from Perk that seems suspicious, please do not respond. Forward it to security [at] perk .com, and we will confirm whether it is legitimate.

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