Senior Engineering Manager

About the company

Parloa develops AI-powered customer service agents that automate enterprise contact center interactions across voice and digital channels.

About this role

<h2><strong>About Parloa</strong></h2> <p>Parloa's ambition is to become an <strong>iconic AI Platform company</strong> serving Fortune 2000 enterprises, an opportunity that presents itself once-in-a-quarter-of-a-century. With global enterprise customers, we are already proving the impact of our <strong>Agent Management Platform (AMP)</strong>, which is evolving into the <strong>AI Agent Management layer</strong> for enterprise AI transformation. We are building <strong>Europe's leading engineering organization</strong> to set the global benchmark for engineering excellence.</p> <p>Our mission is clear: deliver <strong>robust, enterprise-grade, resilient, and reliable AI solutions at speed</strong>. In a fast-moving market where sales cycles for multimillion-dollar deals can be as short as 1-2 months, <strong>speed is our currency</strong>. We are competing head-to-head with the big-tech companies and fast-moving AI-native startups.</p> <p>Our engineering organization is structured into <strong>Customer Experience Automation (CXA)</strong>, <strong>Product Platform</strong>, and <strong>Technology Platform</strong> together delivering a <strong>Composable Customer Experience Platform</strong> built from <strong>Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs)</strong>. Think AWS-like granularity, but built to empower enterprises with speed, flexibility, and resilience.</p> <h2><strong>About The Role</strong></h2> <p>A Senior Engineering Manager at Parloa does the same job as an Engineering Manager, at a bigger and harder scope. You own delivery and business outcomes for a large team, for two or more teams, or for a domain whose work spans several teams. Sometimes the scope is defined by size; sometimes it is defined by difficulty, such as a problem area where the technical and organisational complexity is genuinely hard, and where getting it right matters to the company's roadmap.</p> <p>What changes at this level is altitude and durability. You communicate credibly to Directors and VPs without your manager in the room, framing recommendations and trade-offs rather than reporting status. You own the narrative for cross-functional work that travels beyond your teams. You take the conversations that Engineering Managers escalate to you - performance edge cases, prioritisation conflicts between teams, hard disagreements with peers - and you resolve them. And you are building the next layer of leaders: the tech leads who will become EMs, the senior engineers who will become Staff.</p> <p>You are not primarily a manager of managers. Some Senior EMs move that way, on the path to Director, but most do not and this role does not require it. <strong>The people work gets harder at this level, not lighter.</strong></p> <h2><strong>Areas Of Ownership</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Own delivery across a multi-team or multi-domain scope.</strong> Set milestones, critical path, and quality gates. Manage cross-team dependencies actively rather than reporting on them. Hold a consistent bar for Definition of Done and quality across the scope.</li> <li><strong>Set strategy and roadmap with Product, not unilaterally.</strong> Frame engineering investment in commercial terms - revenue, retention, margin - and surface customer and market signals into the plan.</li> <li><strong>Own the narrative for cross-functional initiatives.</strong> Stakeholders walk away aligned, not merely informed. Author durable artefacts - plans, RFCs, escalation memos, postmortems — that still stand up months later and travel beyond the people in the room.</li> <li><strong>Create the conditions for coherent technical direction.</strong> Partner with Staff+ ICs to shape the technical agenda and own tech debt strategy across your scope. Champion experimentation and prune low-signal bets early. Codify and share the learnings from failures.</li> <li><strong>Hold operational discipline to a consistent standard.</strong> On-call, incident response, and postmortem practice across your scope; reliability targets aligned to product expectations; cost and unit-economics trends tracked and corrected before they spike. Treat blockers as priority work and clear them hands-on across team boundaries.</li> <li><strong>Design the operating model for your scope.</strong> Roles, ownership, and on-call rotations; multi-team operating rhythm; aggregated DORA and SLO metrics; 3–6 month dependency mapping and capacity rebalancing.</li> <li><strong>Grow the next layer of leaders.</strong> Hire senior ICs up to Staff level and, where applicable, first-line team leads. Build a pipeline for hard-to-fill roles. Identify and develop future managers and senior ICs from within. Drive calibration across your scope and coach peer managers on promotion standards.</li> <li><strong>Eliminate classes of blockers, not just individual ones.</strong> When something breaks twice, you fix the system that lets it break.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Who You Are</strong></h2> <ul> <li>A proven engineering leader, typically <strong>10+ years in software engineering with 4-6+ years of people leadership</strong>. You have owned outcomes for more than one team or for a domain spanning several teams.</li> <li><strong>Credible with senior leadership.</strong> You can walk into a room with a VP or a CPO and frame a trade-off, not just present a status update. Your written work is concise and decision-driving.</li> <li><strong>A builder of leaders.</strong> You can point to specific people you hired, grew, and promoted(e.g. a tech lead who became an EM, a senior engineer who became Staff) and describe what you actually did.</li> <li><strong>Technically credible without needing to be the decision-maker.</strong> You partner with Staff and Principal engineers to shape technical direction through influence, and you know when to hold a standard versus when to let a team choose.</li> <li><strong>Commercially fluent.</strong> You understand what your scope costs, what it returns, and how to have that conver