Engineering Manager - Developer Experience *EU/UK remote* (m/f/d)

ABOUT US Pliant is a European fintech specializing in B2B payment solutions. Our modular, API-first platform helps businesses streamline spending, improve cash flow, and integrate payments into their financial workflows. Designed for industries with complex payment needs, such as travel and fleet, Pliant enables greater efficiency, control, and profitability. We serve two primary customer segments: - Companies looking to optimize operational processes through intuitive apps and APIs, gaining control, automation, and financial flexibility through extended credit lines. - Businesses such as financial software platforms, ERP providers, and banks that want to launch or enhance their credit card offerings using Pliant’s embedded finance and white-label solutions. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Berlin, Pliant supports over 4,000 businesses and more than 20 partners globally. As a licensed e-money institution (EMI), we issue credit cards in 11 currencies across more than 30 countries, helping companies streamline and simplify payments. Learn more at http://www.getpliant.com/www.getpliant.com http://www.getpliant.com ABOUT THE ROLE We're seeking an Engineering Manager - Developer Experience to define and lead a brand-new platform engineering team focused on Developer Experience, the discipline where Pliant ensures every engineer is productive from day one and autonomous from day two. This is a founding role. You will be the first hire on the team, which means you get to define what great looks like before hiring the engineers to build it alongside you. You will own the golden path that product teams actually use, CI/CD integrations engineers can modify without raising a ticket, self-service environment provisioning, and a Service Registry as the canonical source of truth for everything running on Kubernetes. Initially, you will be heavily hands-on, coding alongside your team, reviewing designs, and making architectural calls. The expectation is that hands-on involvement remains high as the team is built out, with leadership responsibilities growing in parallel as the team matures. WHAT YOU’LL DO - You use AI-assisted coding tools every day. Claude Code, Cursor, or something equivalent. Not occasionally. You know how to coach engineers who haven't made the shift yet, and you're the one who sets the bar for how the team uses them. Pliant is investing heavily in AI tooling and your team will own the company's AI harness so you need to be its most credible user. - Own the golden path: Build and maintain deployment templates, opinionated CI/CD patterns on top of our Kubernetes cluster APIs, production readiness checklists, and onboarding flows that get a new service to production without filing a support ticket. - Own developer satisfaction as a metric: Track golden path adoption rate, deployment lead time, and time-to-first-deploy for new services. When engineers route around the platform, that is your problem to diagnose and fix. - Standardise AI-assisted development tooling: Lead the team building the AI harness that standardises the usage of assisted development tools across the company, including Claude Code, Cursor, and others. - Build the team from zero: Own hiring, culture, and the technical bar from the very first hire. The people you bring in first define what this team becomes, and you know that. WHAT YOU’LL BRING - 4+ years of software development experience with Python, including 2+ years in leadership/management. Go experience is a strong plus. - Hands-on experience building CI/CD systems, internal developer portals, or golden paths, with enough codebase familiarity to still be useful. You can read a Helm chart, write a Kubernetes admission webhook, and debug a GitHub Actions runner issue. You do not need to be the fastest IC on the team, but engineers need to trust your technical calls. - Deep experience with Kubernetes-based platforms specifically, including cluster APIs, namespaces, RBAC, admission control, and deplo