Engineering Manager / Senior Engineering Manager, Application Platform

Aperture Cloud is building the world’s premier agentic platform for personalization .We’re revolutionizing how businesses connect with their customers, building and deploying AI agents to personalize the entire customer journey. We're taking autonomous search mainstream, making product discovery more intuitive and conversational for customers, and more profitable for businesses. We’re making conversational shopping a reality, connecting every shopper with tailored guidance and product expertise — available on demand, at every touchpoint in their journey. We're designing the future of autonomous marketing , taking the work out of workflows, and reclaiming the creative, strategic, and customer-first work marketers were always meant to do. And we're building all of that on the intelligence of a single AI engine — Loomi — so that personalization isn't only autonomous…it's also consistent.From retail to financial services, hospitality to gaming, businesses use Aperture Cloud to drive higher growth and lasting loyalty. We power personalization for more than 1,400 global brands, including American Eagle, Sonepar, and Pandora. Become an Engineering Manager / Senior Engineering Manager at Aperture Cloud and lead our Application Platform team . In this role, you will lead a foundation team that provides frameworks and shared backend capabilities for product engineering across Engagement, including IAM, audit log, billing pipelines, file management, and core application-development building blocks. You will partner closely with Product, Infrastructure, Security, and application engineering teams to ensure our platform is reliable, secure, scalable, and developer-friendly. Your work will have broad impact across the Aperture Cloud Engagement product, which runs on Kubernetes in GCP and supports customer-facing capabilities such as authentication, authorization, account and project management, usage dashboards, and platform APIs used by multiple teams. This is a full-time role based in one of our Central European offices (Bratislava, Brno, Prague) or remote from Central and Eastern Europe. What You’ll Do Lead and grow a high-performing engineering team through hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development. Set the team’s direction and execution rhythm, balancing roadmap delivery, platform investments, AI adoption, operational excellence, and technical debt reduction. Drive the team’s operating cadence, including planning, backlog refinement, standups, retrospectives, and other team rituals that improve alignment, execution, and continuous improvement. Own the delivery of shared application-platform capabilities that other Engagement teams build on, including application frameworks, authentication and authorization foundations, audit logging, billing-related pipelines, and internal developer tooling. Partner with product and engineering stakeholders across Engagement to identify leverage points where platform improvements can increase delivery speed, consistency, reliability, and developer effectiveness for multiple teams. Drive strong engineering execution through clear priorities, healthy team rituals, continuous improvement, and pragmatic technical decision-making. Drive AI adoption within the team and in the platform capabilities APPT provides to others, ensuring new solutions improve team effectiveness and developer productivity while maintaining strong security, reliability, and operational stability. Help shape the technical vision for the evolution of the Engagement backend platform, especially around shared services, internal APIs, IAM, usage tracking, developer experience, and practical use of AI across engineering. Collaborate with Infrastructure and Security to ensure platform capabilities are robust in production and aligned with operational, compliance, and access-control requirements. Support healthy cross-team collaboration by providing guidance, standards, and office-hour style support for application teams building on top of platform foundations. Contribute to incident response, operational follow-through, and long-term improvements in team-owned production services, including team on-call responsibilities. What We’re Looking For 6+ years in software engineering, with 2+ years in engineering leadership or people management. Proven experience leading backend or platform-oriented teams in a SaaS environment. Strong understanding of application-platform or internal-platform work, where success is measured by the effectiveness, safety, and speed it enables for other engineering teams. Hands-on technical background in modern backend systems and distributed architecture, with the ability to engage credibly in design discussions and guide technical trade-offs. Experience working with cloud-native systems in production, ideally including Kubernetes and GCP-based environments. Familiarity with shared engineering concerns such as authentication, authorization, auditability, developer tooling, CI/CD, and servic