ABOUT SOTHEBY'S
Established in 1744, Sotheby’s is the world’s premier destination for art and luxury. Sotheby’s promotes access to and ownership of exceptional art and luxury objects through auctions and buy-now channels including private sales, e-commerce and retail. Our trusted global marketplace is supported by an industry-leading technology platform and a network of specialists spanning 40 countries and 70 categories which include Contemporary Art, Modern and Impressionist Art, Old Masters, Chinese Works of Art, Jewelry, Watches, Wine and Spirits, and Design, as well as collectible cars and real estate. Sotheby’s believes in the transformative power of art and culture and is committed to making our industries more inclusive, sustainable and collaborative.
THE ROLE
We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to play a central role in the future of our digital products and platform capabilities. You will join and lead a product engineering team responsible for building, operating, and continuously improving software that supports Sotheby’s internal and/or customer-facing experiences.
We want a leader who can be accountable for a critical delivery area while helping the team evolve and innovate. You have a passion for building practical, reusable, and resilient solutions, and you enjoy tackling hard product and engineering challenges in concert with smart people. You can take on complex problems, learn quickly, iterate, and persist toward a good solution.
You are customer-focused and care deeply about delivering tools and experiences that delight and empower users—whether those users are clients, specialists, or internal teams.
This role is open to anywhere in the UK. You can work remotely from within the UK or work in a hybrid or in-office model from our London office.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Builds and leads a product engineering team of highly skilled software engineers, creating an environment of clarity, ownership, and continuous improvement
- Delivers high-quality software outcomes across feature delivery, reliability, security, and operational excellence
- Builds, optimises, and maintains internal and/or consumer-facing tools and services
- Guides the design and build of elegant abstractions, shareable libraries, and robust APIs where reuse creates leverage
- Partners with engineers, product managers, design, and other stakeholders to test and ship features continuously
- Actively looks for ways to improve the end-to-end experience across Sotheby’s product portfolio, including reducing friction, improving performance, and raising quality
- Works closely with product managers on roadmaps, prioritisation, and stakeholder alignment, balancing new development with technical debt reduction
- Drives healthy engineering practices: planning, delivery predictability, incident response, postmortems, observability, and sustainable ways of working
- Supports cross-team collaboration by communicating clearly, aligning on interfaces/contracts, and ensuring effective ownership boundaries
- Stays close to the work through design reviews, code review practices, and hands-on problem solving when it is the most effective way to unblock progress
IDEAL EXPERIENCE & COMPETENCIES
- 8+ years of industry engineering experience in a product-driven environment, ideally 3+ years focusing on full stack application development, technologies, and platforms
- 2+ years in a people management position
- Excellent communication skills, both internally and externally
- A team player who values diverse opinions and empowers collaboration across functions and teams
- Proactive, eager to learn, highly adaptable, and comfortable dealing with ambiguity in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment
- Intrinsically driven to innovate and to take initiative when seeing a process or problem that could be improved
- Eager to learn new technologies and open to learning from others
- Proven experience writing, deploying, and running production services and/or distributed systems
- Experience in API design and building services with clear separation of concerns
- Experience with RDBMS such as Postgres or MySQL and writing migrations
- Preference for Golang experience, but any production, at-scale programming experience is great
- Working knowledge of GraphQL and gRPC is a plus
- Working knowledge and experience with Docker and Kubernetes
- Working knowledge of cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP
- Working knowledge of event-driven architectures and messaging queue systems
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The Company is an equal opportunity employer and considers all applicants for employment without regard to race (including, without limitation, traits historically associated with race, such as natural hair, hair texture, and protective and treated or untreated hairstyles), color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, marital or civil partnership/union status, national origin, age, disability, pregnancy, genetic predisposition, genetic information, reproductive health decision, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, alienage or citizenship status, domestic violence victim status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state/province or local law. The Company complies with applicable state and local laws prohibiting discrimination in employment in every jurisdiction in which it operates.
Top Skills
What We Do
Established in 1744, Sotheby’s is the world’s premier destination for art and luxury. Sotheby’s promotes access, connoisseurship and preservation of fine art and rare objects through auctions and buy-now channels including private sales, e-commerce and retail. Our trusted global marketplace is supported by an industry-leading technology platform and a network of specialists spanning 40 countries and 50 categories, which include Contemporary Art, Modern and Impressionist Art, Old Masters, Chinese Works of Art, Jewelry, Watches, Wine and Spirits, and Interiors, among many others.
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