Engineering Manager
Core e-commerce platform (Java)
A well-known, high-growth e-commerce company operating in Kuwait, serving a large customer base through high-traffic web and mobile platforms.
A hands-on leader who combines people leadership, architecture depth, operational excellence and AI-assisted engineering. Each Engineering Manager owns a defined set of e-commerce domains.
Domains you will own
High-volume, customer-facing. Catalog to payment.
Catalog, Search and Discovery
Large catalogs, product attributes, search performance and relevance.
Pricing, Promotions and Cart
Pricing accuracy, campaign rules, cart persistence and consistency.
Checkout and Payments
Checkout concurrency, payment reliability, reconciliation and distributed transactions.
Customer, Session and Inventory
Session services, inventory availability and order initiation with downstream systems.
Key responsibilities
Technical leadership, reliability and people, in that order of daily weight.
Engineering and technical leadership
- Lead and develop high-performing backend teams building large-scale e-commerce services.
- Give technical direction across Java distributed systems and microservices. Take part in architecture and system design.
- Challenge designs for scalability, performance, resilience, security, maintainability and cost.
- Guide service boundaries, APIs, async workflows, event-driven systems, caching and data models.
- Balance pragmatic delivery with platform quality. Avoid over-engineering and short-term shortcuts.
Scale, performance and reliability
- Set measurable SLOs for critical services. Improve latency, throughput, database and cache efficiency.
- Drive load, stress and capacity testing. Build resilience through timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, idempotency and replay.
- Make teams own their services in production, including on-call and peak campaign periods.
- Lead or take part in major incident investigation and permanent corrective actions.
Engineering excellence
- Raise standards across design, testing, deployment, documentation, security and observability.
- Build a code-review culture where every review improves quality.
- Strengthen unit, integration, contract, performance and end-to-end test coverage on critical flows.
- Run clear engineering metrics: deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR, defects, reliability and debt.
People and delivery
- Coach engineers and technical leads. Grow leaders so decisions do not depend on one person.
- Run performance conversations and development plans. Build succession plans for critical roles.
- Take an active part in hiring and hold a high technical bar.
- Partner with Product, QA, Architecture, SRE, Data and Security. Challenge requirements that add risk without customer value.
AI-first engineering leadership
The team already runs AI agents for code review and production monitoring. Leaders are expected to be strong practitioners.
- Use AI coding assistants and agentic workflows daily for prototyping, investigation, refactoring, testing and documentation.
- Understand LLMs, MCP-based tools and repository-aware agents. Keep security, architecture and human review intact.
- Coach engineers on responsible AI-assisted development.
- Measure AI adoption by productivity and quality gains, not tool usage.
Required experience
- 10+ years of software engineering, with significant hands-on backend experience.
- 3+ years as Engineering Manager, Technical Manager, Engineering Lead or equivalent.
- Large-scale, high-traffic transactional platforms. E-commerce, marketplace or retail technology strongly preferred.
- Strong Java and Spring Boot.
- Fluent English, spoken and written.
- Microservices, distributed systems, REST, event-driven architecture, messaging, caching, database design and search.
- Kafka or similar, Redis, OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, SQL and NoSQL.
- AWS or comparable cloud, Docker and Kubernetes, CI/CD and modern observability and APM.
- Real production examples with numbers: catalog scale, search relevance, cache invalidation, campaign peaks, cart and checkout, payment reconciliation, P95 and P99 latency, root-cause analysis.
- Bachelor’s degree in a technical discipline or equivalent practical experience. Master’s is an advantage.
Preferred: Arabic speakers.
Specific technology combinations matter less than proven ability to design and operate large-scale production systems.
The ideal profile
- Technically credible with senior engineers. Goes deep without micromanaging.
- Decides with data and challenges architecture constructively.
- Understands customer experience and backend consequences. Simplifies complex systems.
- Builds strong engineers and future technical leaders. Communicates clearly with Product and the business.
Year one, measured
What the first twelve months should show.
Campaigns without a critical incident
Peak campaigns delivered on owned services.
Better change failure rate and MTTR
Improved against the starting baseline.
An SLO, dashboard and owner per critical service
Every critical service has a named owner.
A successor for each technical lead role
Plus visible, shrinking technical debt and a predictable delivery record.
Apply or refer a candidate
Send your CV, or refer a candidate, to the address below.