Engineering Manager

Pythia Sports is a fast-growing technology company, delivering innovative solutions to the gaming industry since 2019. Our business is all about predictive sports modelling, underpinned by extensive use of a wide and ever-expanding array of real-time feeds and inputs. If that sounds both complex and hard, it is, but it's also a huge amount of fun! We strive to be the best at what we do every day, and we know that our success comes from our most important resource - our people. We pride ourselves on hiring talented individuals who challenge the status quo and help us to build exceptional, high-performing teams. Based in London Victoria, we're working to a hybrid work-from-home/office model with attendance in the London HQ two days per week. We offer private health and dental insurance, a cycle to work scheme, enhanced parental leave, enhanced sick pay, increased holiday allowance, discretionary annual bonus, and plenty of career development opportunities. At Pythia, you will find a relaxed atmosphere, regular social events and remarkable colleagues looking to push technology boundaries - come and join us!

The Role:

As an Engineering Manager, you will lead a small but growing multidisciplinary team of engineers, testers and infrastructure specialists, all dedicated to ensuring our platform delivers an outstanding experience to our partners. Reporting to the CTO, you will be responsible for the performance, development and delivery of your team. You will translate the company's technical and product strategy into clear priorities, sound engineering decisions and reliable outcomes. With particular emphasis on scalability, performance, resilience, deployability and integration, you will work closely with other senior technologists, and our product and operational leads. Together, you will ensure that we design, build, deliver and operate our platform to the highest possible standards. You will be an experienced people leader and mentor, with strong technical judgement and a good understanding of the modern architectural and engineering practices that underpin successful multi-tenant SaaS services. You will provide technical direction within your area, help resolve complex problems and contribute meaningfully to wider architectural and technology decisions. You will also help Pythia continue with its mission to explore and adopt Al-enabled engineering tools and approaches. We want someone who is curious and willing to experiment but equally committed to disciplined adoption. Al-assisted work must meet the same standards as any other engineering output: it must be understood, reviewed, tested, secure, documented, maintainable and appropriate for production use. Sharing our passion for delivering fantastic solutions, you will leave no stone unturned in helping drive Pythia's success and taking us to the next level.

3 Best Things About the Job:

1. You'll be helping to solve problems almost no one else knows how to solve.
2. You'll be working with complex real-time data from multiple sources.
3. You'll be working on something that cannot fail, but must be designed with failure in mind.

What you will be doing:

• Lead the team: provide clarity around priorities, responsibilities and expectations, while continuing to build an inclusive, accountable and high-performing engineering culture.
• Design it: ensure that everything is designed not just for now, but for the growth of years to come, aligned with longer-term company strategy.
• Build it: enable the team to deliver great solutions that are proven to meet the needs of our partners as well as operational colleagues, providing the necessary leadership and technical judgement to help unblock complex technical issues.
• Test it: foster team accountability for the quality of our outputs by ensuring testing is sufficiently frequent, effective, and efficient.
• Run it: use delivery and operational data to identify constraints, improve engineering processes and help the team deliver more predictably without compromising quality.
• Document Everything: make sure we have top class and up to date technical and use case documentation.
• Innovate smartly and responsibly: lead structured experimentation with Al and other tools, set appropriate guardrails, and embed proven approaches into engineering practice.
• Collaborate: work closely with product, operations, senior leadership and external partners to identify opportunities to improve and extend the capabilities of our platform.

Measures of Success:

In the first six months, you will have:

• Improved the team's cadence and predictability of feature delivery while maintaining appropriate standards of quality and resilience.
• Built a strong understanding of the existing architecture and technology and agreed clear improvement priorities with key stakeholders.
• Established clear ownership, effective working practices and a healthy, accountable engineering culture within the team.
• Strengthened the team's approach to testing, observability, documentation and operational support.
• Identified and evaluated valuable Al-enabled engineering use cases, with appropriate controls for security, quality, data handling and human oversight.
• Introduced successful new tools or approaches into the team's standard ways of working where they deliver demonstrable benefits.

What you need for this role:

• A strong track record of coaching engineers, managing performance and building effective teams.
• Significant experience working in the betting or gaming industry.
• Strong hands-on experience of both Java Spring and Kafka is critical.
• Solid experience of cloud native development, ideally (but not necessarily) on AWS and using Docker & Kubernetes.
• Strong knowledge of the engineering practices required to build scalable, resilient and observable production services.
• A sound understanding of the risks associated with Al-assisted engineering, including security, data privacy, intellectual property, accuracy, maintainability and over-reliance on generated output.
• Very comfortable with RDBMS technologies (preferably PostgreSQL) and REST APIS
• In-depth knowledge of software version control systems (preferably GitLab), and very experienced working with JIRA & Confluence and similar tools.
• Demonstrable experience of Agile methodologies and of working with technical teams across remote locations.
• Ability to work well in a dynamic, fast-paced environment and to pick up new skill sets quickly.
• Comfortable and confident engaging with partners and key stakeholders up to C-level
• A passion for detail and problem solving, with excellent verbal and written communication skills.

This is a leadership role that requires strong technical credibility. You may still work directly with code and systems when it adds value, but your principal responsibility will be enabling the team to make good decisions and deliver excellent outcomes.

Who you are:

• Customer-focused: everything we do is with our partners and stakeholders in mind.
• Organised: helping our technical team become truly efficient whilst keeping things coherent will require real planning and organisational skills.
• Analytical: you should be able to probe data from multiple sources in order to draw meaningful conclusions that make our teams and products more efficient and performant.
• Thrive under pressure: Pythia Sports is growing quickly, and we work hard, so we want you to enjoy being challenged!
• Relevant: the marketplace, our competitors and our partners move fast, so you need to help us keep ahead by staying on top of trends and applying that to how we work.
• Team Player: building great teams is how we will succeed.