Depop
Engineering Manager, Account Protection
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Company Description
Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.
Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it.
Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com.
We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users.
We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.
AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.
If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to adjustments@depop.com.
About The Role
Depop is looking for a UK-based Engineering Manager to lead our Account Protection squad.
The team’s mission is simple: make strong account protection the default for every Depop user, so genuine buyers and sellers can use Depop with confidence.
You’ll help shape and grow this space, building the people, systems, and practices that protect users from account takeover, automated abuse, scraping, and other threats while keeping Depop simple, trusted, and easy to use.
You’ll lead a squad of around 5 to 7 engineers, developing the engineers already in the team and helping hire and onboard new team members as the area grows. You’ll work closely with a dedicated Product Manager, Product Designer, and senior technical partners across Depop.
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This is a single-squad leadership role with meaningful ownership, clear support from senior leadership, and the opportunity to shape an important product-security area at Depop.
What You’ll Do
- Lead, support, and develop a squad of engineers.
- Help establish Account Protection as a clear and effective capability at Depop.
- Own the team’s delivery, health, and product outcomes.
- Create clarity around priorities, sequencing, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs.
- Stay close to technical direction, architectural decisions, and engineering trade-offs without needing to own every technical decision.
- Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, Security, Marketplace, Trust & Support, and operational teams.
- Make risks, dependencies, and decisions visible early, so the right support and alignment are in place.
- Build an inclusive team culture where people can contribute, learn, challenge ideas respectfully, work through disagreement constructively, and grow.
What We’re Looking For
We’re looking for an approachable, thoughtful engineering leader who cares about people, product impact, and technical quality.
You’ll Be a Strong Fit If You Bring
- Experience managing, coaching, or developing engineers.
- A strong software engineering background and comfort engaging with technology, architecture, and technical trade-offs.
- Strong ownership of team health, delivery, and product outcomes.
- The ability to create clarity and momentum in ambiguous or evolving problem spaces.
- A collaborative leadership style, with empathy, clear communication, and the ability to work through disagreement constructively.
- Motivation to protect users and help make online communities safer.
We know great Engineering Managers do not always match every line of a job description. We value different paths into engineering leadership and are interested in the strengths, judgement, and perspective you would bring to the team.
Helpful Experience, Not Required
Any experience in the areas below would be useful, but we do not expect one person to bring all of it. Adjacent experience, sound judgement, and curiosity for the account protection space are also valuable.
- Authentication and account access: login flows, session management, OAuth/OIDC, MFA, WebAuthn/passkeys, device trust, or account recovery.
- Account protection: account takeover prevention, suspicious login detection, credential stuffing prevention, risk-based authentication, or similar user-protection challenges.
- Bot and scraping mitigation: bot detection, bot mitigation, scraping prevention, abuse prevention, rate limiting, or protecting user-facing systems from automated traffic.
- Edge-layer protection: Cloudflare Bot Management, WAF, Turnstile, rate limiting, or similar CDN, edge, or traffic-protection tooling.
- Reliable production systems: observability, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, experimentation, incident learning, or operating systems where reliability matters.
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Where on-call support is required, this is part of a staffed and compensated rota.
What’s In It For You
This is an opportunity to shape a meaningful and growing area at Depop, with real ownership and support from senior leadership.
You’ll help build systems that protect people’s accounts, support genuine buyers and sellers, and strengthen trust in the Depop community. You’ll also have the opportunity to grow the team over time through coaching, clearer team practices, and hiring as the area develops.
Depop offers flexible working, inclusive parental leave, mental health support, learning budgets, volunteering time, and benefits designed to support people inside and outside work.
Depop is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and welcome requests for reasonable adjustments throughout the interview process.
Additional Information
Health + Mental Wellbeing
- PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
- Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
- Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
- Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
- Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting
Work/Life Balance
- 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
- Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
- Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
- Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options *role-dependent
- All offices are dog-friendly
Family Life
- For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
- For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
- IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave
Learn + Grow:
- Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews
- Learning budget
- Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources
Your Future
- Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
- Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva
Depop Extras
- In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.
- Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!
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