Software Engineering Manager

AnyVan makes moving anything anywhere, easier, more affordable and greener for everyone. With Over 8 million customers across the UK and Europe since our launch over a decade ago, we’re proud to be known as the largest, fastest growing tech company in the logistics industry.

Like many popular marketplaces, we’re asset light – i.e., we don’t own any vehicles or employ any drivers. We work with our transport partners and use technology to disrupt the entire delivery and moving process to optimise the most efficient journeys.

Sustainability is a core part of AnyVan’s mission. We’re proud to say we’ve achieved carbon-neutral status on all our transport moves, and we won’t stop here!

So if you want to move your career forward we'd love to hear from you!

Our innovative tech stack is a key part of how we can deliver a world class service at market beating prices. By intelligently matching customer’s jobs to driver’s availability, we can better use vans on the road. This smart allocation allows us to constantly lower prices for our customers, while ensuring our drivers get a fair slice of the pie - all the while cutting miles driven, reducing waste and emissions.

But we've only just started! Over the next few years, we’ll be levelling up our platform, building tech which allows us to:

Better understand the cost to fulfil jobs, allowing us to price more accurately for our customers. Build a deeper relationship with our drivers - becoming a key part of their workflow, and better understanding which jobs are a great fit for them and even explore new business opportunities. For example, buying and selling non-AnyVan jobs between drivers to help them best use their time.

We're looking for an Engineering Manager with a strong technical background, who isn’t afraid to own business critical problems.

We’re an agile organisation - while most of our teams use scrum with two week sprints, we’re not prescriptive and encourage engineering managers and product managers to adapt processes to match their team. We believe strongly in delivering business value, and our engineering managers will regularly interact with stakeholders from all backgrounds and seniority - all the way up to board members - to ensure the team is aligned with the broader business.

We're a cloud-first organisation, with AWS being our cloud provider of choice, and our preferred programming languages are Java - with Spring - and Javascript - using Vue.js. We’re not against exploring other languages where appropriate, with other projects using Python and TypeScript. And of course, no scale up would be complete without a legacy PHP stack we’re slowly migrating away from! Well, no-one’s perfect…

What you'll be doing:

• Collaborate closely with a Product to enable your team to specify, prioritise and deliver high quality solutions which solve important business problems
• Champion the team to senior leadership, highlighting organisational blockers and aligning everyone around the team’s priorities, as well as flagging where the team needs additional input or support
• Ensure the technical direction of the team matches the business strategy, balancing technical debt and non-functional requirements with a need to execute quickly and iteratively
• Build an effective team - ensuring you have the right people in place, taking responsibility for the growth and personal development of team members while giving necessary feedback
• Help energise and invigorate AnyVan and your team’s technical culture, both through day to day interactions, as well as working with the Head of Engineering and CTO on our technical strategy.

Skills and experience you'll need to be successful in the role:

• Strong expertise and success in directly managing high performing technical teams
• Experience working in a fast paced consumer focused business
• Experience working in a scale up or within a marketplace would be advantageous but not essential
• Deep experience with cloud technologies (ideally AWS) and exposure to Java with spring, javascript, Vue.Js, Python, PHP would be advantageous
• Able to build excellent relationships and influence key stakeholders (internally and externally) to consistently deliver against key projects
• Genuine passion for the end product and delivering outstanding technical solutions with pragmatic, logical and maintainable code
• Familiar with software architecture patterns, database optimisations, infrastructure, scalability and deployment
• A broad understanding of the software development lifecycle and practical hands-on experience with continuous integration and continuous delivery & QA
• Experience working in and driving an Agile development environment

DE&I

In our pursuit of fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace, we invite individuals from all backgrounds to join us in our mission. Together, let's create a culture where every voice is heard, every perspective is valued, and every person is empowered to thrive.

Please note if we are able to support visa sponsorship it will be highlighted in the requirements section of the job advert.

Working Patterns

We are extremely proud of our culture and believe in the many benefits that being in the office provides - all our roles require regular time in our office in the central business district in Cape Town.

We do not offer fully remote roles but we support hybrid working wherever possible (3 days in office, 2 days from home). However, to meet the needs of our customers and business operations many of our Operational and Commercial roles are fully office based.

Our Values Are Own, Drive, Deliver:

Own - Have fun, get it done

Work hard, play harder

Satisfaction in results

Do the right thing

Drive - Progress Over Perfection

Innovate and disrupt

Curious and adaptable

Work quick, learn quicker

Deliver - One Team Thinking Big

Collaborate and communicate

Celebrate wins

Embrace challenges