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Engineering Manager - Knutsford
Full time
Why this role exists
PortSwigger is a company built around a simple belief: security should empower people, not slow them down. We create world-class tooling that helps security teams and developers uncover and fix real vulnerabilities, the kind that actually matter. Our products are crafted with care, backed by deep research, and shaped by a relentless drive to make the web safer for everyone.
We're a successful, engineering-led organisation where small squads are empowered to take forward high-leverage work in a suitable way. Curiosity fuels us, craftsmanship defines us, and mutual support keeps us growing together. Here, you'll have real agency, clear direction, and the freedom to push boundaries, supported by thoughtful coaching and a culture that values learning as much as delivery.
The Engineering Tribe
The Engineering Tribe builds the products, systems, and technical foundations that help PortSwigger enable the world to secure the web. Our engineering teams are small, empowered, and highly capable, working closely with Product, Research, Design, and each other to solve difficult problems with care and craft. We value deep technical thinking, fast learning, operational ownership, and pragmatic delivery, creating software that customers trust and that engineers are proud to own.
About The Role
We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a stream-aligned engineering team in Knutsford.
This is a high-impact leadership role for someone who cares deeply about people, delivery, engineering quality, and customer outcomes. You'll create the conditions for a team to do excellent work: clear direction, strong collaboration, sustainable flow, thoughtful technical investment, and an environment where engineers can grow.
You'll work closely with a Product Manager and Tech Lead to shape the team's roadmap, make strategic trade-offs, manage delivery risk, and ensure the team can discover, build, test, release, operate, and improve software with confidence. You'll help the team move quickly and safely, using DORA metrics, operational learning, and customer feedback as signals for where to improve.
This is not a command-and-control management role. You won't succeed by directing tasks or owning every decision — you'll succeed by building a team that doesn't need you to. In practice, that means:
- Coaching through questions, not answers — helping engineers reason through problems rather than solving problems for them
- Unblocking proactively — spotting and removing obstacles before the team has to escalate them
- Challenging assumptions and decisions — including your own — rather than rubber-stamping them
- Supporting people through ambiguity and mistakes, not just through delivery
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You'll deliberately push decisions down to the people closest to the work, invest as much in 1:1s and feedback as in status updates, and keep connecting day-to-day work back to the customer and business outcomes it serves. Success looks like a team that's more autonomous, more effective, and more connected to why the work matters — not one that simply does what it's told.
Requirements
What you'll do
- Lead and develop a stream-aligned engineering team, creating the conditions for high performance, high trust, and sustainable delivery
- Partner deeply with Product Management to shape priorities, calibrate scope, balance technical investment with feature delivery, and connect engineering work to customer and business outcomes
- Work closely with the Tech Lead as a complementary leadership pair, aligning people, delivery, technical direction, and engineering standards
- Own delivery effectiveness for the team, improving flow, predictability, deployability, release confidence, and operational readiness
- Help the team use DORA metrics and other delivery signals to understand and improve deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery
- Protect time for discovery, experimentation, and assumption validation so the team builds the right things, not just things right
- Reduce unnecessary hand-offs and cross-team friction, proactively managing dependencies before they become delivery risks
- Ensure the team owns production software responsibly, including runbooks, service-level indicators, incident learning, rollback confidence, and continuous improvement
- Coach engineers toward autonomy, giving clear feedback, supporting development, and addressing performance issues early and constructively
- Hire and develop strong engineers, contributing to role definition, assessment, interview quality, candidate experience, and hiring decisions
- Make work visible to stakeholders, communicate trade-offs clearly, and publish work in progress early enough to invite useful challenge
- Contribute to the broader engineering organisation by improving how teams interact, share learning, and deliver value together
What we're looking for
- Strong software engineering background, with enough technical depth to reason about architecture, delivery trade-offs, operational risk, and engineering quality
- Significant experience leading software engineering teams, including at least several years in a people leadership role
- Experience leading teams through meaningful change, not only maintaining steady state
- Experience in a stream-aligned or product-aligned team that owns delivery end to end, from discovery through to production operation
- Strong understanding of modern software delivery practices, including CI/CD, testing, observability, deployability, and operational readiness
- Evidence of improving delivery flow, DORA metrics, release confidence, incident response, or sustainable engineering practices
- Experience partnering closely with Product Managers to shape priorities, calibrate scope, assess risk, and balance customer value with technical investment
- Experience working effectively with Tech Leads, creating space for technical leadership while holding shared accountability for outcomes
- Strong people leadership capability, including coaching, feedback, career development, hiring, and performance management
- Ability to make progress in ambiguity, break large work into deliverable increments, and communicate trade-offs clearly
- Strong stakeholder management skills, including the ability to surface risk early and manage dependencies across teams
- Genuine motivation for engineering management as a craft: growing people, enabling autonomy, improving systems of work, and helping teams succeed
- Based within reach of our Knutsford office and happy to work in person as part of an office-first culture
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How you'll work
You'll lead with clarity, humility, and care. You'll share work early, invite challenge, and make evidence-weighted decisions. You'll be trusted to create direction, support the team, and hold a high bar without micromanaging.
You'll be expected to balance delivery and learning: improving how the team ships, while also protecting discovery and feedback loops so the team keeps solving the right problems. You'll operate as a true co-owner with Product Management and a strong partner to the Tech Lead, helping the team make high-quality decisions and deliver meaningful outcomes.
Benefits
At PortSwigger, we believe people should be paid what they're truly worth. We offer competitive salaries, generous pension contributions, and share in the company's success. Alongside this, you'll benefit from healthcare contributions, generous holiday allowance, and a strong focus on learning and development, including our buy-any-book scheme and dedicated time for growth. We care deeply about creating an environment where people can do the best work of their lives.
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