Retire the ERP.
Light exists to replace factory-era ERPs with software that feels alive. Our Smart Financial Platform gives modern, global companies superpowers—automated accounting, real-time reporting, and financial flows that move at the speed of the business.
We build with our customers, ship fast, and obsess over craft. In a short time, Light has gone from idea to the operating core for leading companies like Lovable, Legora, and Keyshot. People don’t just use Light—they enjoy it.
We’re an early team defining a new software category. Think engineers who love debits and credits, designers who care about reconciliation states, and operators who treat finance as a product. If you’re excited to modernize how the world runs money—one workflow at a time—you’re in the right place.
Backed by world-class investors and advised by industry titans, we’re building category-defining products with the freedom to ship ambitiously and own outcomes.
Come help us make Light the global default for next-gen finance.
This Engineering Manager role
You'll lead one of our engineering teams: five to seven engineers building a core part of the Smart Financial Platform. You own the team's health, its standards, and its delivery. This is a hands-on leadership role. You stay close enough to the code to earn your engineers' trust and make real technical calls, but your team's output comes from them, not from you holding the keyboard.
You'll report to the Head of Engineering and work alongside a Product Manager who owns what gets built and why. Your job is to build a team that ships it well.
How you fit into the team
We run small, autonomous teams with a clear split: Product owns the commitment, engineering owns the delivery. You're the person who turns a product commitment into something your team can actually ship, on a sensible timeline, at a quality bar you set and hold. You grow the people on your team, you keep the work humane, and you're the first to know when something's drifting, never the last.
What you'll own
Own the complete system of your domain end-to-end, ensuring world-class reliability, correctness, and scalability across every entity and jurisdiction Light serves.
Design and build the infrastructure and internal tooling that lets the rest of the org move faster on [domain].
Implement market-specific compliance and regulatory requirements (VAT, e-invoicing, local GAAP) to accelerate Light's European expansion.
Break down ambiguous product commitments into shippable work, set realistic timelines, and renegotiate early when reality changes.
Recruit, build, and lead a high-performing engineering team — own the funnel for open roles and a new joiner's first 90 days to productive.
Hands-on ownership of key features in your domain. You ship code, not just review it.
Run people growth and performance with the same rigor you apply to delivery: named growth focus per engineer, drift caught early, nothing a surprise at review time.
Basic qualifications
Exceptional software engineering background with deep experience building large-scale, high-stakes systems (financial, transactional, or accounting platforms preferred).
Proven ability to lead technical initiatives and directly manage engineering teams.
Strong track record delivering complex backend systems in production.
Passion for financial infrastructure and building products companies actually rely on.
Preferred skills and experience
5+ years on large-scale systems, ideally in fintech, accounting, or multi-entity financial operations.
Experience leading engineering in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
Expertise in distributed systems, multi-book ledger design, or compliance/regulatory infrastructure.
Proficiency with Kotlin, React, or comfort getting fluent fast.
The good stuff
In addition to being part of a great team and working in a really fun and innovative environment, we offer:
💸 A competitive salary + potential stock options
🏝 25 days of annual leave + public holidays in the country where you are based.
🥳 Regular socials and company off-sites
🚀 A huge opportunity for career growth as you'll help shape a market-defining product.
The famous last words
Working at Light means you're embarking on an exciting journey to reshape the future of multinational financial operations. Our cheat-code is that we've built something like this before - and are now doing it again, only better. Our goal is to make global finance effortless and empower companies to make informed decisions.
Join the rocket ship while it's taking off 🚀
Skills Required
- Experience managing a team of engineers, including growth, feedback, performance, and hiring.
- Strong engineering background: read designs, review PRs, and hold technical lines with senior engineers.
- Proven track record of shipping and owning delivery for a team; breaking down ambiguous work.
- Genuinely AI-native: experience using AI tooling and judgment about where it helps.
- Clear, direct communication and escalation; timely, specific feedback.
- Experience in SaaS or FinTech, especially multi-entity financial operations or global accounting.
- Experience with a Kotlin / React stack or ability to become fluent in it.
- Experience standing up or reshaping a team (not just inheriting one).
What We Do
Light is the new way to run multinational finances for modern technology companies. Run AR, AP, expenses, bookkeeping, and financial reporting automatically across all your entities — without the chaos of multiple systems. Crafted and built by the designers and engineers behind world-class companies like Spotify, X, AWS, Klarna, Google and Shopify, we empower multinational finances with a joyful user experience like no other. See more at www.light.inc.
