Product Engineering Lead (Engineering Manager) - ShiftX

Product Engineering Lead (Engineering Manager) - ShiftX at Ardoq Lead a sharp team while staying close to the code — and close to the users. The Ardoq Story Ardoq is one of Norway’s most exciting scale-ups - a truly global company built out of Oslo. We are a SaaS platform that helps organizations understand, manage, and evolve their complex digital landscape. By providing a dynamic, collaborative "digital twin" of their business, we connect systems, people, and processes to drive better decision-making and accelerate digital transformation. ShiftX is a real-time, AI-native process modeling tool. You map workflows, customer journeys, and org processes in a visual canvas — with your whole team editing at once. We're replacing hours of static documentation with living models that connect to the systems and people behind them. About the Role This is a player-coach role, not a pure people-manager role. You’ll spend most of your time building the product, while also spending intentional time on making the team better, setting technical direction, mentoring engineers, and partnering with product to keep the roadmap honest. We’re not looking for someone who’s ready to stop coding. We’re looking for someone who’s been a strong engineer long enough that they want to multiply their impact through a team, without giving up the craft entirely. ShiftX is our collaborative process modeling product, acquired by Ardoq two years ago. You’d be leading the ShiftX engineering team and shaping how it grows. What you’ll do Write and review code: TypeScript and React, mostly on the frontend canvas and data layer. You’re not just approving PRs—you’re in the codebase. Own technical direction: You’re the architectural authority for the ShiftX domain, not a coordinator. Decisions land with you. Develop engineers: 1:1s, direct feedback, code review, career conversations. You hold the bar and help people grow into it. Stay close to users: You’ll join customer calls, watch session recordings, and occasionally sit in on onboarding sessions—not as support, but as the person responsible for what gets built. Understanding where users struggle or succeed is something you model for your team, not something you delegate. Prioritize ruthlessly with product: Partner with the product manager to keep the roadmap honest. Push back when technical realities are being papered over. Make the call when there’s no clear answer. The Technical Problems Collaborative canvas at scale. Real-time multiplayer editing on structured process graphs—performance, state sync, conflict resolution. AI-native features that generate process maps from natural language and images. And the integration layer between ShiftX’s process models and Ardoq’s broader architecture graph. The added dimension in this role is making sure a team of sharp engineers is pointed at the right things and unblocked. You’ll Fit If… You’re a senior engineer who has started feeling the pull toward leadership but hasn’t left the code. You have strong frontend architecture opinions and can defend them in a design review. You give direct, actionable feedback—you don’t mistake niceness for kindness. You’re genuinely curious about how users experience the product. You’d join a demo or a user research call without being asked, because it informs how you lead the team. You’re comfortable with a roadmap that isn’t fully baked; ShiftX is still finding its legs inside Ardoq and the best opportunities are still being discovered. You are tech-savvy and fluent in leveraging modern AI tools to enhance team performance and engineering velocity. Worth Being Honest About… This role has light but real management responsibilities. If you want to stay purely technical with zero people responsibilities, this isn’t the right fit. If you’re ready to try leadership but want to stay in the code, it probably is. The "Ardoq Way" We live by three core values that define how we work and treat each other: BOLD: You continuously raise the bar, chal