(Senior) Engineering Manager - Advisor Audit

Shine exists to help freelancers and small business owners reclaim the joy of working for themselves.
Running a business shouldn't mean drowning in financial admin – it should be inspiring and rewarding. Our app brings banking, invoicing, accounting and admin together in one place, so entrepreneurs can focus on what matters most: growing their business and enjoying the freedom of working for themselves.

We're a multicultural team of over 400 people across France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. By bringing together leading European fintechs like Shine, Kontist and Tellow, we've built a single, intuitive platform designed for simplicity, speed and accuracy ,backed by local, award, winning support.

Your hiring experience matters
Just as we respect our customers' time, we respect yours. Your experience with Shine should feel simple, transparent and genuinely supportive.
If this sounds like somewhere you want to grow, we'd love to hear from you

The Advisor Audit Team at Shine

The Advisor Audit Team is a newly formed team with a mission to build the intelligence that aims to revolutionise accounting for small business. The Advisor Audit Team is responsible for developing the sophisticated insights that drive accuracy and efficiency for advisors auditing client documents and entries across more than nine European countries, helping us fuel a worldwide shift in how business is done. New colleagues will step into an exhilarating environment, and be at the forefront of a major transformation, embracing a brand new mission, pioneering a state-of-the-art technology stack, and building a high-impact culture alongside new, driven teammates.

Your role as a (Senior) Engineering Manager

As an Engineering Manager, you’ll help to elevate your team's technical standards by championing sustainable development, prioritising operational excellence, and fostering a quality-first mindset. You’ll strike a balance between ambitious technical goals and pragmatic delivery, ensuring that reliability, security, and long-term scalability are integral, not secondary.

The Engineering Manager shall ensure that the team's purpose and accountability are tightly integrated with the organisation's strategic objectives, creating an environment where engineers can dedicate their focus to high-value work, consistently shipping value early and often.

Whether engaging with the team, collaborating across the organisation, or in broader professional interactions, you’ll focus on building mutual understanding, aligning individuals around a shared purpose, establishing trust, and enabling action with empathy.

In joining a newly formed team, you’ll be joining a dynamic environment in which ambiguity is not a hurdle, but an opportunity. You’ll have the confidence to navigate evolving priorities and shifting landscapes with a forward-looking perspective, and convert uncertainty into focused action, leveraging the energy of change to drive innovation.

We will also consider candidates for a Senior Engineering Manager’s position.

Job located in Berlin, Germany

Your responsibilities will include:

• Team Leadership: You’ll build a psychologically safe environment, where every engineer feels safe to speak up, take calculated risks, and be truly heard; enabling us to tackle novel challenges together.

• Engineering Excellence: As the driving force behind some of our most critical engineering outcomes, your knowledge and experience will guide the team through complex challenges and critical decision points. You will own the technical implementation, articulating and executing a strong, well-formed architectural vision. Your insights on design, testing, and cloud infrastructure will facilitate the high-stakes decisions that balance immediate business needs with long-term scalability and maintainability.Breaking down silo’s, we want you to embrace a "you build it, you run it" mantra, championing a DevOps culture and operational excellence across the full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to help teams run and maintain high-scale production systems that serve millions of customers. You’ll ensure our systems remain secure, optimised, and unbreakable.

• Mission Focus: Defining and embodying your team's purpose, you’ll ensure the alignment with the broader organisational strategy by articulating a clear, meaningful mission that gives the team's work purpose, fostering a culture of proactive ownership toward mission success.

• Efficient Delivery: You’ll demonstrate a proactive approach to planning, execution, monitoring, and control to ensure that all deliverables meet the defined scope, quality standards. You’ll optimise the team's delivery flow by, reducing overheads, and fostering an environment where engineers can focus on high-value work, ship value often, and avoid burnout. All this is underpinned by an Agile Mindset and strong agile principles, with empowerment to choose the best framework for the team's context.

• Collaboration & Communication: Working hand-in-hand with a Product Manager (PM) and Designer, you’ll collaborate with colleagues beyond your immediate team, championing cross-functional partnership with colleagues and stakeholders across all our global locations. You’ll be an unwavering advocate for our users and customers, focusing on their needs into everything you do. Alongside the PM, Designer, and your brilliant engineers, you will be the architect of your team's operational rhythm, establishing crystal-clear expectations and creating a transparent map of your team's inner workings. You operate with visibility and transparency, ensuring an impact-focused narrative around known technical challenges, and turning potential roadblocks into managed priorities and opportunities.

If hired as a Senior Engineering Manager (EM), you would also be responsible for leading one team while also contributing to cross-domain support and organisational development, for example contributing to the company-wide AI adoption program.

Your First 6–12 Months

0-3 Months

• Model and champion a psychologically safe environment where curiosity, candid feedback, and ownership are the norm.

• Take full, unambiguous ownership of the team's technical commitments.

• Define and implement the team's preferred delivery methodology (e.g., Kanban, Scrum) and measure its initial effectiveness, securing team buy-in.

• In partnership with Product and Design, clearly define the team's unambiguous mission, 12-month vision, and a pragmatic technical roadmap that addresses early ambiguity.

• Develop, implement and track OKRs and KPIs that measure business impact (e.g., customer adoption, reliability, development velocity trend) over simple activity/output.

• Actively collaborate within the broader engineering organisation

3-6 Months

• Deliver foundational customer value while elevating engineering standards

• Successfully deliver the initial core foundational features to customers

• Establish baseline metrics for code quality, test coverage, and reliability.

• Ensure AI Transition Readiness

6-12 months

• Maintain a high-performing, resilient team that consistently delivers, mentors, and actively

Senior EM focus only:

• Organisational Impact

• Successfully transition the team to AI-native engineering processes,

• Demonstrate the measurable productivity gains or technical efficiencies gained from the AI adoption.

• Develop the strategic roadmap for the following 12-18 months, focusing on innovation and continuous improvement.

About you

You are a pragmatic leader who can balance leading leaders with hands-on involvement when needed. You are comfortable navigating ambiguity, building new teams or projects from scratch, and creating structure as things scale.

Must-Have Experience:

• A strong technical background with the ability to challenge the team effectively and guide them in technical decision-making.

• Familiarity with the full Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), embracing the "you build it, you run it" philosophy.

• Must have well-formed opinions on software architecture, design patterns, testing methodologies, and cloud infrastructure (specifically AWS)

• Evidenced track-record of Delivery Management and People Leadership

• Possesses a strong agile mindset and deep understanding of Agile principles; pragmatic, not dogmatic.

• Customer Focused with genuine interest in understanding and solving customer problems, not just technical delivery.

• Previous experience in an engineering management position.

• Eagerness to take a hands-on approach when necessary.

• A positive attitude towards continuous learning and personal development.

• Fluent in English.

Note: Specific programming language expertise (e.g., TypeScript, React, Node.js) is not a mandatory requirement. No explicit educational background is specified as a mandatory requirement.

Nice to Have

• Previous experience as an Engineering Manager within a large and complex organisation.

• Active engagement with AI, going beyond superficial understanding, ideally with practical experience in AI adoption (Must have for Senior EM)

• Experience and informed opinions on leveraging AI in software engineering and R&D to boost efficiency.

• Experience and active participation in the discovery phase, working closely with the Product Management and Design functions.

• Familiarity with User-Centred Design and User Experience (UX/UCD) principles.

• Experience with Test-Driven Development (TDD) and/or Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) testing practices is beneficial.

• A background or domain knowledge in accounting or FinTech is helpful.

Our recruitment process

1️⃣ Screening call with Talent Acquisition: Motivations, leadership style, adaptability

2️⃣ First Interview: A first assessment interview covering leadership, people management, and delivery management

3️⃣ Second Stage Interview: Technical interview to confirm technical capability. Technical skills are confirmed through a live architecture challenge (e.g., a whiteboard session).

4️⃣ Case session: Strategy, architecture, migration, and team leadership

• Simulated Underperforming Engineer: For a leadership challenge conversation.

• Leadership/Problem Solving: Confirmed through a leadership-specific challenge

5️⃣ “ Meet the Team”: Meeting with the Product Manager (PM) and Designer, aligning on ways of working, values and team cohesion.