Engineering Manager, Growth Foundations at Payward (Kraken)

The Role

As an Engineering Manager within Growth Foundations, you’ll lead and develop a team of engineers who deliver high-impact features, platforms, and tools that power our growth. You’ll ensure the team is aligned, supported, and set up to execute with excellence — turning complex challenges into simple, reliable solutions that reach users around the world. You will also stay hands-on and deliver production-grade features personally every day.

The Opportunity

• Lead, mentor, and support a cross-functional team of engineers delivering growth-critical systems and features

• Collaborate daily with Product and Design to define scope, set priorities, and ensure seamless execution

• Maintain clear expectations, realistic estimates, and transparent communication with stakeholders to keep projects moving forward

• Provide technical guidance and context to help engineers make sound architectural and implementation decisions

• Foster a culture of accountability, trust, and learning — helping the team grow their impact and autonomy

• Improve team processes, communication, and collaboration across time zones

• Partner with other engineering leaders to ensure consistency and best practices across the broader Growth organization

• Leverage AI tooling daily to boost personal and team productivity

• Stay hands-on in the codebase, writing production-grade code and setting the bar for quality, reliability, and speed

What You Bring

• 5+ years of experience leading engineering teams and delivering high-quality results in a collaborative environment

• Strong people leadership skills — you invest in coaching, clarity, and empowerment

• Solid technical foundation, especially on the backend; you can engage in design discussions, code reviews, and help engineers make pragmatic decisions

• Strong individual contributor background — you write production-grade code and lead by example

• High proficiency in modern AI-driven development — you use AI daily to boost personal and team performance through automation

• Familiarity with one or more modern programming languages (e.g. TypeScript, Rust, Go, Python, or similar)

• A product mindset — you care about how your team’s work impacts users and moves key metrics

• Clear communication and organizational skills, with the ability to align engineering efforts with business goals

• Experience working in distributed, remote-first teams

Nice to Haves

• Experience with analytics, performance/paid marketing, experimentation, or growth tooling

• Background in developer experience, SDKs, or internal platforms

• Exposure to scaling teams or processes during high-growth phases

How You Lead

• You lead by setting context, not control — empowering engineers to make decisions with clarity and confidence

• You coach through curiosity, helping others grow their judgment and autonomy

• You communicate transparently, ensuring alignment across engineering, product, and design

• You model accountability and empathy, creating an environment of trust and shared purpose