Engineering Manager - Platform

• Experience: 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ managing engineering teams; built or operated APIs, integration platforms or shared services used by other teams or external partners; led modernisation while keeping delivery going; handled customer-impacting incidents.

• Technical skills: distributed systems and API design (REST, versioning, gateways); integration patterns (mapping, messaging, events); cloud operations (AWS preferred), containers, CI/CD; API security (OAuth2, mTLS, rate limiting); observability and SLOs.

• Languages: fluent English (mandatory; interviews in English); French a plus.

• Communication: clear and direct, in writing and in person; negotiates priorities with internal customers.

• Interpersonal skills: strong people management and coaching; makes hard trade-offs and says no with reasons; ownership under ambiguity.

• Nice to have: automotive, DMS/CRM or OEM integrations; marketplaces or partner ecosystems; AI-enabled products.

As Engineering Manager for Platform, you will lead a team of 8-10 engineers across France, Portugal and Spain, responsible for the APIs, the API gateway and the integration services that connect Nextlane's products with dealers, partners, OEMs, and each DMS and CRM. Reporting to the VP Engineering - Platform, you will be accountable for team development, delivery predictability, service reliability and security, and the technical sustainability of the platform.

You will partner closely with Platform Product, Architecture, Security, DevOps, Customer Success, the OEM Interfaces and DMS/CRM teams, and the product teams that build on the platform. Product owns the vision, the roadmap, and the what and why; you own engineering capacity, delivery planning, and the when and how. You will treat the teams that depend on the platform as customers: agree contracts and service levels with them, make risks, dependencies and trade-offs visible, and say no with reasons when you need to.

This is a technically credible leadership role, not a full-time coding position. You must be able to review API and integration designs, challenge architectural decisions, guide engineers, and go into the code or production diagnostics when an incident needs it.

This role needs a change-oriented leader who can improve how the platform is built and run while keeping it available to the products, partners and dealers that depend on it.

• Lead, coach and grow a team of 8-10 engineers across France, Portugal and Spain.

• Hold regular one-to-ones, give clear feedback, manage performance, build career plans.

• Own the team's hiring, onboarding, capability planning and succession.

• Grow technical leadership inside the team, with clear accountability.

• Build a team where people learn continuously and feel safe to raise problems early.

• Own the reliability and evolution of the APIs and integration services Nextlane's products, partners, dealers and OEMs depend on: the API gateway, the integration layer and the connectivity to each DMS and CRM.

• Treat APIs as products: clear contracts, versioning and deprecation rules, backward compatibility, documentation consumers can trust.

• Agree interfaces and service levels with the product teams building on the platform, and make it easy to adopt: self-service onboarding, SDKs, contract tests.

• Help move integrations onto the platform's shared front door, working with the OEM Interfaces and DMS/CRM teams on common standards.

• Build security into every API: authentication and authorisation, secrets management, rate limiting, vulnerabilities fixed on time.

• Turn roadmap priorities into realistic plans, with estimates and dates you revise openly when things change.

• Own sprint planning, capacity, reviews and retrospectives, and protect the team from unplanned scope.

• Present the team's plan, commitments and dependencies in each planning cycle.

• Manage a platform's many cross-team dependencies, and release readiness.

• Use delivery metrics to improve predictability and report progress honestly.

• Work with Platform Product in a clear model: product owns the what and why, engineering owns the when and how.

• Make sure work is ready before it's committed; challenge unclear requirements.

• Ensure every platform change is reviewed and merged by the team that owns it.

• Bring engineering input to discovery, feasibility and the roadmap; handle critical technical escalations with other teams and customers.

• Run a disciplined, traceable SDLC with Jira as the source of truth: Definitions of Ready and Done, quality gates, release criteria.

• Build the right automated-testing strategy, including contract tests for the APIs others depend on.

• Define and meet service-level objectives; own on-call, incident response and post-incident reviews.

• Balance roadmap delivery, defects, operational support and technical debt.

• Review solution designs with our Architecture Practice and challenge choices when needed.

• Lead the modernisation of long-lived integration software while keeping the service running.

• Make technical debt visible and tie it to business impact.

• Lead the Engineering team to AI driven development where sensible, ensuring Platform is ready for AI-enabled use: APIs agents can call safely, with identities, limits and audit.

• Operate cloud workloads (AWS preferred) in a hybrid estate - cloud services plus software installed at dealer sites.

• Drive CI/CD, infrastructure automation and release management across that estate.

• Use logs, metrics, traces and alerts to keep services healthy, available and resilient.