Engineering Manager

About hireworks

hireworks is building a community of top talent in Bulgaria and unlocking unparalleled access to positions at leading U.S.-based companies. As your employer, hireworks will ensure you have a seamless interview, onboarding, and employee experience—providing ongoing support and resources along the way. Established in 2023, hireworks is forging corp-to-corp relationships with leading U.S. organizations looking to grow their teams with best-in-class talent out of Bulgaria. Working with hireworks means joining a network of peers, mentors, and long-term career opportunities.

About our client

A sophisticated relationship-mapping platform is redefining high-stakes advocacy by enabling organizations to influence the worlds most elusive leaders through their own trusted networks. Rather than relying on traditional broad-reach advertising, this technology utilizes massive public datasets to visualize the complex web of social and professional connections surrounding key stakeholders, such as C-suite executives, policymakers, and investors. By identifying the specific colleagues, advisors, and personal contacts who actually shape a leader’s perspective, the platform allows Fortune 500 companies and global agencies to deliver strategic content directly to a decision-makers inner circle. This approach ensures that a brand’s most critical messages bypass traditional gatekeepers and surface naturally within the private ecosystems where the most important business and policy decisions are actually made.

About the Role

Our client is expanding its Bulgaria-based engineering organization and is seeking an Engineering Manager who will work in close partnership with the U.S.-based Engineering Director to support, align, and guide a high-performing engineering group. This team contributes to core components of the technology platform, working across large-scale data processing, automated pipelines, distributed systems, and front-end application development.

This role is hands-on and technical, but with a strong emphasis on ensuring engineers are supported locally while staying aligned with decisions, priorities, and architectural direction coming from the New York leadership team. The Engineering Manager will help translate strategy into clear execution plans, reinforce best practices, and ensure smooth coordination across distributed teams.

Team Leadership & Execution

• Support, mentor, and develop a multidisciplinary group of engineers, ensuring they are heard, understood, and empowered while remaining aligned with company-wide direction.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, coaching, performance reviews, and growth planning.
• Reinforce engineering standards, processes, and best practices established in partnership with U.S. leadership.

Technical Oversight & Architecture

• Work closely with the Engineering Director to communicate architectural direction and ensure the team executes consistently across front-end, back-end, and data engineering efforts.
• Guide implementation of ETL pipelines, schema design, distributed processing, and large-scale data workflows.
• Ensure technical decisions made in NYC are clearly understood and effectively implemented by the Bulgaria team.
• Support delivery of data visualizations, UI components, and interactive dashboard features.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Act as a connective layer between Bulgaria-based engineers and U.S. Product and Engineering leadership.
• Translate business and product priorities into actionable engineering plans.
• Help ensure alignment across product, data, and engineering functions.

Project Delivery & Prioritization

• Drive roadmap execution and sprint delivery within the Bulgaria engineering group.
• Coordinate multiple parallel projects spanning ingestion, ETL pipelines, APIs, dashboards, and infrastructure.
• Identify risks, remove blockers, and maintain predictable delivery with support from U.S. leadership.

Operational Excellence

• Reinforce high standards for code quality, reliability, observability, and performance.
• Support the implementation of monitoring, alerting, and production stability processes.
• Encourage best practices in testing, documentation, and continuous integration.

Culture & Communication

• Build a collaborative, supportive, and aligned engineering culture for Bulgaria-based engineers.
• Communicate proactively and transparently with U.S. leadership about progress, challenges, and team needs.
• Represent the Bulgaria engineering group while reinforcing unified technical and organizational direction.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional engineering experience, including senior-level development.
• 3+ years of leadership as an engineering manager, tech lead, or team lead.
• Strong computer science fundamentals and experience with distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with:
  • JavaScript/React or similar front-end frameworks
  • Python, Java, or Scala for server-side development
  • SQL, relational schemas, and NoSQL databases
  • ETL pipelines, distributed data processing (Spark, Hadoop), and cloud-based architectures
  • Experience with AWS (S3, Lambda, Glue, EMR, RDS, Redshift)
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience leading teams in fast-paced, high-growth environments.
• Experience with dashboards, reporting systems, or data visualization tools.
• Prior experience scaling engineering teams or managing multiple workstreams.

Benefits

hireworks is cultivating a growing community of top talent across Bulgaria. In addition to unlocking access to positions at top tier U.S. based companies, we offer a variety of benefits to enhance your experience:

• Competitive Pay – compensation that reflects your experience and accomplishments.
• Remote Flexibility – work from anywhere in Bulgaria, with the option to use our Sofia co-working space.
• Paid Time Off – ample vacation days to rest and recharge.
• Public Holidays – all Bulgarian federal holidays are fully paid days off.
• Contract Flexibility – choose between a standard Bulgarian labor contract or a B2B set-up, depending on your preference.
• Supplemental Health Insurance – additional coverage available for team members on a standard labor contract.