Example Company
Software engineer
- Location
- San Francisco
- Type
- Full time
- Compensation
- $150k-$200k
- Posted
- 2 days ago
Join a team building useful software. Work closely with engineering and design to turn new ideas into products.
Loading job details
Engineering Manager - Developer Experience *EU/UK remote* (m/f/d)
- Location
- Remote
- Type
- Full time
- Posted
- 17D AGO
About the role
ABOUT US
Pliant is a modular B2B payments platform combining commercial card issuing, payment accounts, FX and spend management for businesses and AI agents.
Businesses across travel, e-commerce, insurance and AI-native technology use Pliant to manage complex payment workflows, while fintechs, software platforms and banks use its infrastructure to build and operate their own commercial payment offerings.
Pliant's API-first platform also enables AI agents and applications to access regulated payment infrastructure with permissions, controls and auditability built in.
Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Berlin, Pliant serves businesses and partners across Europe and North America. A principal member of Visa and Mastercard, Pliant issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries under its European e-money license and through regulated partners in the UK and US.
Learn more at www.getpliant.com.
ABOUT THE ROLE
Developer Experience (DevEx) is a new platform engineering team at Pliant. The team gives engineers and AI agents one fast and safe path to production, without support tickets.
You are the first hire. You set the technical bar and hire the team. You also stay hands-on: you write code, review designs, and make the architecture decisions. Your team owns the golden path, CI/CD, self-service environments, the developer CLI, and the Service Registry for everything that runs on ECS today and Kubernetes in the future.
Our tech organisation moves to a shared agentic framework: AI agents take work from idea to production, and people make the decisions at defined gates. A dedicated Agentic Tooling Engineer owns the shared infrastructure of that framework. Your team owns the delivery path that the framework and every engineer use, and you work closely with the Agentic Tooling Engineer to move the framework's gates into the platform.
This is a full-time role with a 40-hour week.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Own the golden path. This includes deployment templates, CI/CD patterns on our ECS and later Kubernetes cluster APIs, and the onboarding flow that takes a new service to production. SRE defines the production readiness criteria, and your team builds them into the path.
Give engineers and AI agents one delivery path. They use the same golden path, developer CLI, and gate workflows, and they pass the same checks. Security defines the gate policies, and your team owns the workflows that run them.
Connect the agentic framework's build and release steps to the golden path and the platform checks, together with the Agentic Tooling Engineer. Make AI agents a normal part of how product teams deliver.
Measure developer experience with golden path adoption, deployment lead time, and time to first deploy. When engineers go around the platform, find out why and fix it.
Own hiring, the technical bar, and the team culture from the first hire.
WHAT YOU'LL BRING
7+ years in software engineering, including at least 3 years managing engineers directly. Strong Python. Go is a strong plus.
You built a golden path, an internal developer platform, or a CI/CD system that product teams chose to use. You can show how you measured adoption and what you changed when teams went around it.
Deep, hands-on ECS and/or Kubernetes experience with cluster APIs, namespaces, RBAC, admission control, and deployment patterns. You can read a Helm chart, write an admission webhook, and debug a GitHub Actions runner.
You use AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) every day for real delivery work. You can tell us what worked, what failed, and what you changed.
You raise the bar when you hire. You can name engineers you hired or developed and explain how they made their team stronger.
You design security in from the start. You add checks to the delivery path, not reviews at the end.
You can debug outside your own stack. Our product teams use Java and Kotlin. You do not need to write Java, but you can read a stack trace and a build log and tell a configuration issue from a code bug.
Experience building an agentic delivery workflow, where AI agents write, test, and ship changes and people approve the high-risk ones, is a strong plus.
Fintech or other regulated-environment experience is a strong plus. We operate under PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and DORA.
Familiarity with Node.js is a plus, not a requirement.
Fluent in English.
WHAT WE OFFER
Founding role in a function Pliant is investing in heavily: the opportunity to define what Developer Experience becomes here as we scale.
High-impact ownership of the processes and workflows that power the entire tech org.
A fast-moving, product-led organisation with significant growth ahead.
A highly international, flat, and collaborative team environment.
Competitive compensation and equity package.
Flexible work setup (remote, hybrid, or Berlin office).
Attractive benefits including a monthly mobility allowance, Wellhub membership, and a company card with a lunch/coffee budget.
Pliant is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and abilities, and are committed to an inclusive hiring process. If you need any accommodations during the interview process, please let us know.
At Pliant we use the Ashby AI Criteria to assist with looking over resumes against our job qualifications for this role. All final decisions are made by our Talent Team and Hiring Team.
A human is behind these processes. Ashby does not automatically reject candidates or make final hiring decisions. Our teams review all results and make the final hiring decision with every candidate that applies.
