Senior Engineering Manager

Join our team at the Guardian and be a part of a diverse and inclusive global organisation that delivers fearless, investigative journalism, and holds power to account. Our team of award-winning journalists, cutting-edge commercial professionals, and industry-leading digital experts are committed to making a difference and represent a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. We offer a challenging and exciting environment for career development, with a focus on training, growth and fostering an inclusive culture.

We are now looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to join the Reliability and Operations team. The team’s main objective is to build a new Developer Experience platform that improves the efficiency of the Guardian’s engineering team by strengthening our observability and deployment capabilities and making it easier to develop software. In this role you will guide a group of developers to decommission our existing platform and support the team in identifying a migration strategy that ensures it is completed within an agreed timeframe. 

Our infrastructure lives in AWS and most of our backend code is written in Scala, but other languages such as TypeScript and Go are used where appropriate. The Reliability and Operations team sits in the Developer Experience Stream alongside the Security and AI and Automation teams, collaborating frequently with both teams as appropriate.

In the Guardian’s Product and Engineering department, we are exploring AI technologies and their potential role in enhancing the productivity of our software engineering team. You will provide support and guidance to your team in leveraging AI technologies for software development, carefully considering the risks and opportunities.

About the role

• Support a group of developers in their technical and personal development, acting as their primary point of contact, providing the developers with regular feedback and guidance. 
• Coaching developers on areas for development, celebrating their achievements and recognising their strengths.
• Demonstrating your experience and knowledge as a developer with a variety of experience across domains and technologies, including your experience and interest in DevOps and migrations. 
• Communicating your team’s goal and vision, and how that relates to the wider organisation.
• Ensuring the team collaborates with the Product and Engineering department to migrate services to the new platform and that the department is informed about the work that the team is doing.
• Prioritising work to ensure the team stays effective.
• Ensuring the team has the right balance between product delivery and technical maintenance. 
• Actively participate in the engineering management team and shape practices to improve the wider department, including recruitment, mentoring and evolving our development practices.

About you

• Experienced people manager, committed to supporting your line reports and their career development and building effective, inclusive teams.
• Experience of working within the DevOps, platform engineering or Site Reliability Engineering space. 
• You have an understanding of cloud-native architecture and modern DevOps tooling.
• Demonstrated examples of driving improvements to the reliability, observability and/or maintenance of services through the use of tooling and modern best practices.
• You are interested in contributing to the Developer Experience stream’s long term strategy.
• Familiarity with the team’s tech stack, including AWS and at least one of the team’s coding languages (e.g. Typescript, Scala, Go)

We actively encourage applications from groups traditionally underrepresented in the UK media

We operate in a hybrid environment working 3 days a week from our offices in Kings Cross and 2 days a week remotely. 

We strive for transparency in remuneration. The salary for new Senior Engineering Managers at the Guardian is £112,000 per year. 

We value and respect all differences (seen and unseen) in all people. We aspire to have inclusive working experiences and an environment that reflects the audience we serve, where our people have equal access to career development opportunities, their voices are heard and can contribute to our future. We actively encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. Many of our staff work flexibly and we will consider all requests for flexible working arrangements.

How to apply

Please upload your CV and covering letter as one document. You should also highlight the extent to which your skills/experience meets the requirements of the role and your motivation behind applying.

Our interview process involves two stages: a face to face interview and a pairing test. 

We appreciate the time taken to prepare each application we receive. We do not use AI-assisted technology to review applications; every application is reviewed by a member of our recruitment team.

The closing date for applications is Tuesday 7th July 2026. 

All roles at the Guardian are open for everybody to apply. It is important to us that you feel supported and comfortable throughout your recruitment process, in order to perform your best. Please let us know if there are any changes we could make to help your application, this includes providing documents in accessible formats or personalising the process to better support your needs. Please contact Anna Vipers on [email protected] to discuss further so we can work with you to support you through your application.

Benefits at the Guardian

You'll have 30 days of annual leave per year (plus bank holidays) with the option to purchase an additional 5 days. Our pension scheme is generous; if you contribute 5% then we will contribute 8-12% (depending on your age). We believe in giving back, which is why employees are given 2 volunteering days annually and the option of payroll giving. Season ticket loans are also available.

You are entitled to private healthcare, life cover, income protection, and eye tests. You can also opt in to dental insurance.

We have enhanced maternity, paternity, adoption and shared parental leave policies in place. We also support our employees by offering an IVF, menopause, baby loss, and trans equality policy.

Culture and wellbeing

We want everyone to feel like they belong at the Guardian and we champion diversity of thought. Our various employee forums provide a platform to use their voice to foster an inclusive workplace. We became the first major media organisation to achieve B Corp status.

We offer tools to help you prioritise your wellbeing including access to our employee benefits platform which provides tailored support for health and wellbeing. In addition, we also offer free yoga and pilates classes. These run alongside our corporate gym membership and cycle to work scheme.

Our canteen has views overlooking the Regents Canal and caters for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Learning and development

We encourage personal and professional growth. Employees have access to a broad range of tools and solutions, and we are happy to support the pursuit of professional qualifications through vocational courses and apprenticeships.