About EngageRocket
EngageRocket is the first venture-backed HR Technology company in Southeast Asia with the mission to create better workplaces through people analytics. We help organisations improve employee experience from hire to retire, driving outcomes such as stronger retention, engagement, and performance.
Our long-term vision is to enable better management decisions through continuous, data-driven workplace feedback. Achieving this requires not only strong technology, but strong engineering leadership — this is where you come in.
Role Overview
We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead engineering delivery for critical, enterprise-facing product areas. This role is responsible for execution reliability, engineering excellence, and team effectiveness, ensuring that complex, customer-impacting work is delivered predictably and sustainably.
This role is especially critical in a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment where not all processes are fully defined. You will be expected to stabilise execution, drive alignment across teams, and ensure delivery continues reliably even under ambiguity and pressure.
You will lead a team of engineers and your role is to set direction, create clarity, remove obstacles, and raise the bar. You will also play a key role in strengthening how we deliver as an organisation, ensuring that work lands cleanly for our customers, not just gets built.
This role is well-suited for someone who combines strong technical judgement with people leadership, and who enjoys building systems that help teams scale without losing quality or purpose.
About You
You see engineering as a way to solve meaningful problems and deliver real outcomes, not just ship code. You care deeply about building environments where engineers can do their best work while staying grounded in customer impact and business reality.
You bring structure without rigidity, and are comfortable making trade-offs when constraints are real. You are able to operate effectively even when processes are incomplete, and you take ownership of driving alignment and progress rather than waiting for perfect clarity.
You believe great outcomes come from strong ownership, clear communication, and disciplined execution.
Key Responsibilities
Engineering Delivery & Execution
- Own end-to-end delivery for assigned product areas, from planning through release and client impact
- Translate product and customer needs into clear, sequenced, and realistic execution plans with explicit ownership and dependencies
- Proactively identify gaps in alignment, communication, or process, and resolve them before they impact delivery
- Drive clear coordination across engineering, QA, DevOps, and product to ensure smooth and predictable releases
- Step in early to unblock teams and enforce alignment, rather than relying on escalation
Execution Discipline & Accountability
- Set and enforce clear standards for ownership, communication, and delivery across the team
- Ensure that ambiguity or lack of process does not block progress, and that teams actively align to move work forward
- Hold teams accountable for outcomes, not just activity
- Reinforce behaviours that prioritise delivery, alignment, and customer impact over individual optimisation
Engineering Leadership & Team Growth
- Lead, coach, and support a team of engineers
- Set clear expectations around ownership, quality, and accountability
- Create space for engineers to focus on deep work while providing guidance when needed
- Foster a growth mindset through regular feedback, mentorship, and coaching
Technical & Quality Excellence
- Champion high-quality engineering practices across the full development lifecycle:
- Planning and design
- Implementation and code review
- Testing and automation
- Documentation, observability, performance, and reliability
- Guide technical decision-making to balance speed, scalability, and long-term maintainability
- Ensure engineering work upholds high standards for data privacy, security, and robustness
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Partner closely with Product, Design, People Science, Customer Success, and other stakeholders
- Drive explicit alignment across teams working on shared systems or environments
- Ensure dependencies are actively managed and not left implicit
- Facilitate clear conversations around scope, priorities, constraints, and trade-offs
- Help teams understand why work matters, not just what needs to be done
Commercial & Customer Awareness
- Balance speed, quality, and scope based on customer impact and business priorities
- Understand and respond to customer-facing pressure, ensuring commitments are met or risks are surfaced early
- Make pragmatic trade-offs to ensure delivery remains reliable under constraints
Building Scalable Ways of Working
- Stabilise and standardise execution first, then progressively introduce lightweight processes that improve consistency without slowing teams down
- Improve delivery practices, tooling, and team rhythms over time
- Reduce reliance on heroics by building repeatable, sustainable execution patterns
- Help the organisation scale enterprise delivery without unnecessary process or overhead
Qualifications & Experience
Required
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, including people leadership
- Proven track record of leading teams to deliver reliably in fast-paced, ambiguous environments
- Experience stabilising or improving delivery in teams with execution or coordination challenges
- Strong foundation in modern software engineering principles and practices
- Experience developing and scaling SaaS or cloud-based applications
- Proficiency with modern web technologies (e.g. JavaScript or TypeScript, React, Python, Node.js, Golang)
- Experience with relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL
- Strong written and conversational English
Capabilities & Traits
- Strong ownership mindset, accountable for outcomes, not just activity
- Clear and proactive communicator who drives alignment across teams
- Structured thinker who can operate effectively under ambiguity and pressure
- Comfortable addressing gaps in coordination, accountability, and execution
- Customer-centric, with empathy for how technology impacts real users
- Growth-oriented and curious, with the ability to learn and adapt quickly
Nice to Have
- Experience delivering enterprise or data-heavy products
- Familiarity with distributed systems, analytics platforms, or configurable dashboards
- Exposure to DevOps, cloud infrastructure, and security best practices