Ebury is an SME-focused cross-border payments platform.
<div class="content-intro"><p>Ebury helps ambitious businesses unlock global growth, and we take the same approach with our people. We encourage innovation and movement, collaboration and problem-solving, and foster an environment where everyone can feel they belong, are valued, supported and empowered to succeed.</p> <p>If you’re a collaborator who wants to help transform how businesses operate globally, get in touch - we’d love to discuss how Ebury can accelerate your career so you can shape the future.</p></div><p><strong>Engineering Manager - Founding Team (Ebury Web Platform)</strong></p> <p><strong>Valencia Office - Hybrid: 4 days in the office, 1 day working from home</strong></p> <h3><strong>Build the banking experience the world's businesses deserve</strong></h3> <p>Ebury is a global fintech, headquartered in London. We help businesses move money across borders — FX, payments, and lending — in 140+ currencies, sending payments to 160+ countries across 30+ regulated markets, delivered by 2,000+ experts in 40+ offices worldwide and backed by the stability of majority-owner Santander. That's a bank's reach and reliability with the pace of a product team. And we've set ourselves a deliberately hard bar: beat the best digital-first experience in our market, not merely match the incumbents.</p> <p>That bar is an engineering problem — and increasingly, a <em>leadership</em> problem. Great systems don't ship themselves; teams ship them. As a founding Engineering Manager in our new Valencia hub, your job is to build and lead the team that solves it, directly on the platforms our clients touch every day: the web portal, the mobile apps, the APIs. This isn't back-office plumbing, and it isn't a coordinator role. Every team in this hub builds client-facing products, and your mission is unambiguous: build a team that builds the best banking-and-payments experience in the market.</p> <p>We also expect you to be AI-native. Not "curious about AI" — fluent. You use AI coding tools as a genuine force multiplier in your own work, you know how to help a team adopt them well, and you know how to design AI into the product so clients get answers and outcomes instead of forms and waiting.</p> <p>We're opening a new engineering hub in Valencia, and you'd be one of its founding Engineering Managers — not the manager of team #40, but one of the first people setting how this hub hires, how it builds, what "good" means here, and which product bets are worth making.</p> <h2>Why this role is different</h2> <p><strong>You'll build the team, not inherit it.</strong> As a founding EM you'll hire your first engineers, set the interview bar, and shape the culture from an empty room. The people you bring in and the standards you set in the first six months will echo for years. If you want to walk into a fully-formed team and keep it running, this isn't your role. If you want to decide what this team <em>is</em>, read on.</p> <p><strong>You'll own outcomes through your team, not tickets.</strong> Your team takes a real client problem — "businesses can't see why a payment is held" — and owns it end to end: the experience, the services and APIs behind it, the data, the measurement, and the iteration after launch. Your job is to make that ownership real: give the team the context, the trust, and the room to make product calls, then hold the bar on quality and delivery. You'll have opinions about what to build and the standing to act on them.</p> <p><strong>You'll be a player-coach early, a leader always.</strong> At founding stage the team is small and you'll stay close to the code — pairing, reviewing, unblocking, and shipping the occasional change yourself to keep your judgement sharp and your credibility earned. As the team grows, your leverage shifts from your own commits to the people and systems you've built. You're comfortable with both modes and know which one the moment calls for.</p> <p><strong>You'll build platforms, not one-offs.</strong> Our third principle is blunt: never build for one client, region, or deal — generalise before committing, or decline. New currencies and payment rails are onboarded as configuration and adapters, not bespoke branches. Finish-and-tidy is part of the work — cutover, decommission, delete the dead code. You reward the engineer who retires a flag, not just the one who ships the feature, and you make that value stick in how your team works.</p> <p><strong>You'll work on the real thing.</strong> Client-facing web and mobile channels evolving in parallel; an event-driven, API-first transactional platform on AWS where services own their data and talk only through known contracts; a governed GCP/BigQuery data world. Money-movement discipline — idempotency, deterministic retries, reconciliation — is table stakes, because we're handling businesses' actual cash. You don't need to be the deepest expert in every layer, but you need the technical depth to lead the people who are.</p> <p><strong>Your work will be measured by client outcomes — and team health.</strong> Self-service completion, time-to-answer, and the reliability and latency of core journeys as the client experiences them are first-class metrics here. So are the ones that tell you whether your team is built to last: delivery predictability, engineer growth and retention, on-call sustainability, and the quality of the bar you hire against.</p> <h2>What you'll do in your first year</h2> <p><strong>Days 1–30:</strong> learn the domain and the platform, ship a small pre-scoped change to production in your first week or two to earn credibility and feel the pipeline for yourself, meet your stakeholders in Product and Design, and start building the hiring pipeline for your first engineers.</p> <p><strong>By 90 days:</strong> own a defined product area with a small team around it, run the core rituals (1:1s, planning, retros, on-call) with intent rather than ceremony, land your first hires against a bar you've helped define, and le