Engineering Manager at bloomon

Hi, we’re Bloom & Wild. We don’t just send flowers. We help our customers to care wildly. Caring wildly is celebrating the little things we all do for each other every day. Not just the big occasions. It’s being there for the highs. Stepping up for the lows.   We care wildly about people and our planet. Which is why we’re so proud to be a certified B Corp™ – committed to making long-term positive change for our community, and the world around us.   Founded in 2013, our mission back then was to make sending and receiving flowers the joy that it should be, by harnessing technology, brand and letterbox delivery. We announced £75 million Series D funding in 2021 and that same year acquired bloomon in The Netherlands and Bergamotte in France. Together, we’ve fulfilled and delivered over 20 million orders (and counting!), making us the largest direct to consumer flower business in Europe.   Now home to a family of 3 beautiful brands, we’re driven by our vision to create the destination for making life a little more thoughtful and beautiful. And we won't stop at flowers and plants. Starting with the Bloom & Wild brand, we're expanding our gifting offering to other categories like cakes, candles and cocktails. This is all part of our ambition to build Europe's #1 direct to consumer gifting destination.  ⚙️Technology at Bloom & Wild Our Technology team of over 60 people sits right at the heart of our business. We build and maintain the solutions that power e-commerce, production and fulfilment, enabling our brands to delight our customers every day.  The Product Engineering team consists of five cross-functional squads who each own their own business and architectural domain, and are supported by our Platform, Domain Engineering, Data and IT teams. You will be leading a  squad that sits at a unique vantage point within our Engineering organisation. While other squads focus on specific customer-facing features, the Domain Engineering squad focuses on the bigger picture: architecture, scalability, and developer velocity. Our mission is to decouple our large monolithic codebase, defining clear boundaries and interfaces that allow our other Product Engineering squads to move faster and more independently. This is a rare opportunity to do high-leverage work—solving complex architectural puzzles that directly multiply the impact of the entire engineering team. Our platform uses technologies including Ruby and Rails and Python/ React, backed by PostgreSQL, Fargate/ECS on AWS, and Cloud Run on GCP. It exposes APIs that are used by our multi-brand Angular webapp and our native iOS and Android mobile apps.  We’re also looking at developing new domain driven services & microservices where applicable. Most of our team is based in the UK or The Netherlands and works in a flexible model, with choice in how often they travel to the office. Our squads meet in person at least once per quarter in order to maintain connections, collaborate on larger projects and have fun together. We welcome applications from candidates based remotely within roughly two hours of the UK time zone, covering many European countries. This helps us stay aligned as a team while supporting flexible, remote-friendly ways of working.   You can read lots more about our technology stack and our culture over on our tech blog  Code & Wild and on our technology careers page 💻 What you’ll be doing • Leading a pivotal squad: You will lead the Domain Engineering squad. A specialised squad designed to facilitate and enable our other Product Engineering squads, helping them move faster by removing architectural dependencies. Your mission is to clear the path for other squads, removing friction and unlocking velocity across the entire business. • Shaping the future architecture: You won't just maintain code; you’ll actively deconstruct our monolith. You will be responsible for leading the strategy to identify domain boundaries and build the clear interfaces that transform our platform into a scalable, distributed system. • Staying technical and hands-on: You will balance technical leadership with people management. We’d like someone who can dive into the code, pair on complex problems, and "get stuck in" alongside the team to drive delivery, while also guiding the squad's technical direction. • Solving the "Scale" puzzle: You will guide the team to look beyond simple execution, focusing on high-level software design and architectural principles. You are solving the complex problems that come with success, ensuring our technology grows as fast as our business. • Growing and nurturing talent: You’ll take immediate ownership for hiring and building a cohesive, high-performing team from the ground up, with a focus on enabling personal growth and career development. • Collaborating to unlock value: You will work closely with Product and Engineering leadership to scope out technical roadmaps that don't just deliver features, but ensure long-term system health and stability. • Championing technical excellence: You will set a high bar for code quality, helping the team understand why we build things a certain way and spotting architectural "wrong turns" before they become blockers. • Fostering a culture of ownership: You will encourage the team to own their work from ideation through to production release, creating an environment of autonomy, accountability, and technical pride. ✅ You’ll love this role if… • You are an empathetic leader who genuinely loves delivering through others. While your primary focus is on guidance and enablement, you are also comfortable being hands-on when necessary, and maintain the technical capability to contribute directly to the code base and architecture. You are comfortable guiding, evaluating, and flexing your style to get the best from those around you. • You have a deep understanding of software architecture and design principles, specifically regarding the decoupling of large monoliths and defining clear domain boundaries (we value architectural thinking over specific language experience). • Your background in software development combined with experience in people management, allows you to effectively guide the technical direction of a squad of highly senior engineers. • You worked in an engineering environment of significant scale, understanding the challenges of enabling multiple squads to deploy independently and ensuring system stability. • You’re excited about problem-solving and have a curious mindset, loving to learn and often taking initiative to improve things, especially when taking a logical and collaborative approach to finding solutions cross-functionally with other teams. • You have a positive and optimistic attitude - you overcome setbacks and obstacles, and inspire and motivate those around you too. It would be great if you also… • Have worked with Ruby on Rails monoliths at scale and have led efforts to migrate architectural approaches towards scalable, distributed systems • Have demonstrable domain driven design experience • Successfully guided architectural shifts within a scaling business These are some of the skills and experience we think will enable success in this role, but please don’t worry if you are missing some of these. We’re committed to building a team made up of different strengths, skills and experiences, so if you’re excited about our values, passionate about what you do and would like to join us in doing things more thoughtfully, we’d love to hear from you. 🏡 Belonging at Bloom & Wild Group We know that we learn through our differences, and building a diverse team has always been central to creating the best experience for our customers.  We value all backgrounds, perspectives, ideas and experiences, and encourage everyone to share their opinions openly within our caring and inclusive team.   🧭 Our ways of working We do things a little bit differently. From inventing letterbox flowers to founding The Thoughtful Marketing Movement. We’re big on collaboration, empathy, knowledge sharing and growth, and our values drive our priorities every day:   Lead change for good: we have the guts to try new things and step up to do what matters most Think deeply, act swiftly: we make sure there’s thoughtful rationale behind our approach and always act swiftly to implement ideas  Care wildly: we pour care and creativity into everything we do and pay attention to the things that make a difference Stay open, be curious: we’re open about what we’re doing and why, and we welcome challenges from each other   We really believe in the power of face-to-face connections - be that through a shared project, a learning and development opportunity, or an after work social - and trust our teams to make the right decisions (for them and us) about where and how they work each day. Our working patterns are flexible and vary across the business, depending on the type of work, need for collaboration, and personal and wellbeing circumstances.     🌟 (Some of) The good stuff To care wildly for our customers, firstly we care wildly for our teams. We work hard to craft a culture of thoughtfulness and care, where there is a strong sense of inclusion and belonging, enabling all of our people to thrive and be successful each day.    🌻 Work that works for you  - Flexible working (core hours from 10-4pm) - Work Abroad for up to 30 days each year  - Share in our success with a choice to take equity options from day 1 - 1 day per year to volunteer on a project that’s close to your heart - We’ll support your commute to our office and site locations.  Depending on your journey to work, this may include a Swapfiets, an NS business card or expense reimbursement - Phone allowance   🌴 Time off - 24 vacation days and an option to buy an extra 5 each year - Happiness days (1 extra day each quarter for your personal ‘me time’) - 1 celebration day per year, to celebrate a holiday that’s important to you - Flexible bank holidays - trade a bank holiday for another day that fits your beliefs, values and celebration calendar   🌱 Health and wellbeing - Mental health support through Open Up, including access to online therapy sessions - Allies and champions groups - Mental Health First Aiders and awareness training for our managers  - In person and virtual yoga every week - Our office kitchen is stocked with healthy drinks and snacks to keep you going - Workplace pension contributions   🌳 Growth & Development - A flexible training framework for every stage of your career development through our Bloom & Learn programme - Internal & external  Speaker Sessions on a variety of different inspirational topics.    💐 Moments that matter - We love having lunch together!  We offer daily fresh and healthy lunch options at our locations in Amsterdam and Amstelveen, - A BBQ-worthy rooftop terrace (Amsterdam HQ) - Social & wellbeing monthly calendar - We love to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and other important milestones! - Summer and End of Year events, team lunches and post-peak celebrations - Irresistible discounts on our products, blooms & subscriptions!     🫱‍🫲 Getting hired We know that job searching can be daunting, and we want to do everything we can to ensure that your experience with us is a good one. Interviewing is a 2-way process, and we’re keen to answer all of the questions you have, so that you can be sure (and excited!) that we’re the right move for you. If your application is successful, you can expect the following process:   - Chat with Billy (Senior Talent Acquisition Manager) to run through your experience, motivations and the role - Interview with Tonci, Head of Engineering for OpsTech, to get into more of the detail. - A technical test and interview with some of the engineers that you'd work with day to day. - Interview with our Product team. - Final interview with Joe, our CPTO   We believe in leading change for good, so do let us know if there’s anything we can do to support your application process. Also, if you have any feedback, please help us to improve our candidate experience by sharing (anonymously) here.