EU remote
Engineering Manager - Developer Experience *EU/UK remote* (m/f/d)
About this role
ABOUT US Pliant is a modular B2B payments platform that combines commercial card issuing, payment accounts, FX, and spend management in one system — adapting to existing setups rather than requiring customers to replace them. Businesses across industries such as travel, e-commerce, and insurance use Pliant to manage complex payment workflows with cards, backed by credit lines Pliant underwrites itself. Fintechs and software platforms embed Pliant's payment infrastructure into their own products, from API-based Cards-as-a-Service to fully white-label solutions.
Banks use Pliant's Card & Spend OS, the customer-facing interface, on their own infrastructure to run card programs. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Berlin, Pliant serves 5,000+ businesses and 40+ partners across Europe and the United States. A principal member of Visa and Mastercard, Pliant issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries — under its own European e-money license and with licensed partners in the UK and US.
Learn more at http://www.getpliant.com/www.getpliant.com http://www.getpliant.com ABOUT THE ROLE We're seeking an Engineering Manager - Developer Experience (m/f/d) to define and lead a brand-new platform engineering team focused on Developer Experience, the discipline where Pliant ensures every engineer is productive from day one and autonomous from day two. This is a founding role. You will be the first hire on the team, which means you get to define what great looks like before hiring the engineers to build it alongside you.
You will own the golden path that product teams actually use, CI/CD integrations engineers can modify without raising a ticket, self-service environment provisioning, and a Service Registry as the canonical source of truth for everything running on Kubernetes. Initially, you will be heavily hands-on, coding alongside your team, reviewing designs, and making architectural calls. The expectation is that hands-on involvement remains high as the team is built out, with leadership responsibilities growing in parallel as the team matures.
WHAT YOU’LL DO - You use AI-assisted coding tools every day. Claude Code, Cursor, or something equivalent. Not occasionally. You know how to coach engineers who haven't made the shift yet, and you're the one who sets the bar for how the team uses them. Pliant is investing heavily in AI tooling and your team will own the company's AI harness so you need to be its most credible user. - Own the golden path: Build and maintain deployment templates, opinionated CI/CD patterns on top of our Kubernetes cluster APIs, production readiness checklists, and onboarding flows that get a new service to production without filing a support ticket.