Engineering Manager (.NET / Azure)

StrongPoint is a Norwegian-listed retail technology company with 500+ employees, helping some of Europe’s largest grocery retailers improve their e-commerce and fulfilment operations.

Our award-winning Order Picking portfolio powers online grocery operations across Europe, and we are continuing to expand with new products, new markets, and new engineering teams.

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead one of the engineering teams within StrongPoint’s Order Picking portfolio.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys both technical leadership and software development. We are not looking for a manager who has stepped away from coding, but rather for a strong engineer who still enjoys contributing to the codebase while leading a team.

You will work closely with Product, Engineering and Platform teams to deliver scalable solutions that handle:

• High-throughput order flows
• Real-time orchestration
• Complex retailer integrations
• Mission-critical production environments

What You Will Do

Product Engineering Leadership

• Drive roadmap execution, break down initiatives, sequence delivery, and keep the team unblocked
• Define and uphold engineering standards, code quality, testing discipline, and release practices
• Own technical design decisions for new features and integrations
• Manage technical debt strategically, balancing delivery pace with long-term platform health
• Collaborate with the platform engineering team on shared infrastructure, APIs, and picking orchestration

Hands-On Engineering

• Write production code and be a meaningful, regular contributor to the codebase
• Lead code reviews that raise the bar across the team
• Drive architectural thinking on system design, order flows, integrations, performance, and scalability
• Leverage AI-assisted coding tools to accelerate delivery and encourage the team to do the same

People & Team Leadership

• Lead and mentor a small team of engineers
• Conduct 1-on-1s, career conversations, and day-to-day coaching
• Hire and onboard engineers who thrive in a hands-on, product-focused environment
• Build a culture of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement
• Partner with QA to embed quality practices into the team’s development cycle

Product & Operations

• Work with the Product Owner to refine requirements and translate them into engineering deliverables
• Own the reliability of the product in production, monitor, triage, and resolve issues with the team
• Act as the technical escalation point for customer-reported issues
• Feed operational insights back into the product roadmap

What We Are Looking For

Must Have

• 7+ years of software engineering experience
• Experience in a Tech Lead or Engineering Management role
• Strong backend engineering background with .NET / C#
• Genuine hands-on development experience
• Experience building and shipping products end-to-end
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, APIs, and event-driven architectures
• Strong English communication skills, written and verbal
• Based in Bulgaria (Sofia preferred)

Strong Advantage

• Experience with AI-assisted coding tools
• Hands-on Microsoft Azure experience
• Experience with Cosmos DB, Service Bus, Redis or App Services
• Familiarity with microservices architecture
• Experience with high-throughput transactional systems
• Background in retail technology, e-commerce, fulfilment or logistics
• Experience with Azure DevOps

You Will Thrive Here If You

• Are genuinely uncomfortable losing touch with the codebase
• See management as an extension of your engineering craft, not a replacement for it
• Enjoy building and shipping products, not just maintaining them
• Are curious and pragmatic about AI tools
• Can balance technical leadership and people leadership
• Treat production reliability as a shared team responsibility

What We Offer

• Full-time employment contract with Encore Ltd
• Competitive salary aligned with Sofia senior engineering market rates
• Additional health insurance
• Food vouchers
• Multisport card contribution
• 22 days paid annual leave
• Hybrid working model with flexibility
• International working environment
• Direct exposure to senior leadership
• Strong engineering culture focused on quality, innovation and continuous improvement
• Opportunity to build and shape a growing engineering team
• Clear growth path into broader leadership as the product and team scale