Sr. Engineering Manager

Job description

talabat is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager in Dubai to lead multiple engineering teams, typically four squads of around 20 engineers, across a single technical domain. The role is accountable for domain-level technical strategy, team health and growth, delivery excellence, business impact, cross-functional leadership and technical decision-making.

Responsibilities

• Domain-level technical strategy — Work with product leadership and your teams to define a 12–18 month technical vision for your domain
• Team health and growth — Build an environment where engineers thrive: hiring, developing ICs, mentoring junior managers, and creating psychological safety
• Delivery excellence — Guide your teams through discovery, planning, and execution using small-batch delivery and continuous feedback loops
• Business impact — Translate product objectives into technical solutions; quantify and communicate the impact of your domain's work
• Cross-functional leadership — Work closely with product, design, and business partners to resolve ambiguity and drive alignment
• Technical decision-making — Guide your teams on system design, architecture, and engineering practices while maintaining talabat's standards for scalability, security, and performance

Requirements

• 4+ years of hands-on technical leadership experience managing engineering teams
• Demonstrated ability to hire, mentor, and grow engineers — we care about your track record of developing people, not just technical skills
• Comfort with cross-functional leadership: working with product, design, business partners, and other engineering teams
• Emotional intelligence: you navigate ambiguity, handle conflict constructively, and create psychological safety for your teams
• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience in production systems
• Deep understanding of at least one of: distributed systems, backend systems, data platforms, mobile platforms, or web-scale infrastructure
• Proven ability to work across diverse technology stacks — we care that you've made architecture decisions that matter, not that you've used every specific tool
• Hands-on understanding of XP practices: TDD, pair programming, continuous refactoring, and trunk-based development (or strong willingness to learn and lead talabat's approach)
• You think about non-functional requirements: scalability, reliability, latency, cost efficiency, and security — not just feature delivery
• You've navigated the tradeoffs between speed and technical debt; you know when to optimize and when to simplify

Skills

• Agile
• Architecture
• Distributed Systems
• Engineering Management
• Team Leadership
• Technical Strategy