Engineering Manager - Realtime

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for an Engineering Manager - Realtime based in United Arab Emirates. As Engineering Manager, you will lead a team responsible for building and operating a globally distributed real-time infrastructure that enables developers to deliver low-latency communication and data synchronization experiences. You will oversee a critical service built around messaging, presence, and database change notifications, balancing performance, reliability, scalability, and operating costs. Combining people leadership, technical guidance, and delivery ownership, you will help experienced engineers do their best work while maintaining high engineering standards. You will shape the team's roadmap, support its professional development, and ensure effective collaboration across a remote-first environment. You will also play a key role in incident management, operational excellence, and the continuous evolution of the platform. Accountabilities You will lead the Realtime engineering team across people management, technical direction, delivery, and operational responsibilities. Your main responsibilities will include: - Team leadership and development: Build a healthy, high-trust team culture within a globally distributed environment. Conduct regular one-to-ones, manage performance, support career development, oversee onboarding, and handle team administration. - Recruitment and organizational development: Own the team's hiring plan and act as the Hiring Manager, leading first-round interviews and partnering with Talent Acquisition to attract and recruit strong candidates. Contribute to headcount planning, organizational design, and the development of engineering leadership. - Roadmap and delivery management: Own the team's roadmap and project execution, using Linear to establish priorities, clear milestones, and accountability. - Workflow and stakeholder coordination: Manage incoming requests and Slack triage, deciding what should be prioritized, delegated, or challenged.

Provide regular team updates and maintain alignment with stakeholders without creating unnecessary processes. - Service quality and operational performance: Coordinate the team's response to support tickets and ensure service-level objectives (SLOs) are maintained. - Risk and dependency management: Identify delivery risks, dependencies, and technical trade-offs early, communicating them clearly to leadership. - Incident management: Train and operate as an Incident Commander, coordinating incident response, resolution, and follow-up activities. - Continuous improvement: Lead blameless post-incident reviews and ensure lessons learned translate into meaningful improvements. Requirements The ideal candidate combines substantial engineering experience with a strong commitment to people management. You should be comfortable leading senior engineers, navigating complex distributed systems, and creating the structure needed for a high-performing remote team. Relevant qualifications and skills include: - At least 5 years of engineering experience, with sufficient technical depth to engage credibly with engineers working on complex systems. - At least 3 years of experience managing remote engineering teams. - Previous experience leading a team responsible for building and operating a low-latency, high-connection service, such as WebSockets, pub/sub, messaging, presence, or streaming systems. - Strong knowledge of distributed systems, including clustering, rate limiting, backpressure, and capacity planning. - Experience leading teams through production incidents affecting customer-facing services, including follow-up work and blameless reviews. - Experience understanding developer needs for real-time APIs or SDKs and shipping such products to external customers.