Engineering Manager, Admin and CORE Platforms, Kanpla

ABOUT KANPLA

We build the platform that powers contract catering across Europe and the US. We're a fast-growing scaleup with an ambitious, energetic engineering team working to reshape the contract catering industry. Our products help serve food at over 5,000 locations to more than half a million users, and we have offices in Aarhus, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, and Philadelphia, plus many teammates working remotely across Europe.

ABOUT THE TEAMS

You'll manage two teams from day one: Admin and CORE. Admin is Kanpla's back office: a high-stakes, versatile system that kitchen chefs and account managers at our customers rely on to set up and run everything: menus, pricing, orders, and the day-to-day configuration that makes the rest of Kanpla work. It's built to flex to each provider's specific setup, with multiple configurations, integrations, and operational models, while cutting down the time our customers spend on admin rather than adding to it. Get it right and our customers run their operations smoothly. Get it wrong and everything downstream feels it. CORE owns the shared foundation underneath all of it: the data model, the core services, and the ordering pipeline that every other team builds on. It's the team everyone else depends on, which makes prioritisation and capacity genuinely hard and genuinely important. Two teams, two very different kinds of pressure. One is breadth and configurability; the other is depth and being the dependency in everyone's critical path.

WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS

We don't have a real engineering management layer yet. People leadership has effectively run through Product Managers and through senior engineers who were already carrying full technical ownership. That has three costs we can name clearly:

• Engineers don't have a clear path to grow, take on more ownership, or get honest feedback on their performance.
• Too many decisions bottleneck in one place, and cross-team initiatives fall between chairs.
• Our current model scales for maybe one or two more hires per team before someone is responsible for seven-plus people and the technical direction.

This is one of the first two dedicated Engineering Manager roles at Kanpla, and the first hired externally. We're hiring it before the pain hits rather than after, so the person in it gets to build the function properly instead of firefighting it.

WHAT THIS ROLE IS, AND WHAT IT ISN'T

We're being deliberate about the split, because we've seen the alternative and it doesn't work. This role is: people and capacity ownership. Growth, performance, feedback, staffing, hiring, and making sure your teams can run without waiting on approvals. This is a player-coach role, not a pure manager. Expect to stay hands-on around 20–30% of your time: pairing, reviews, the occasional small piece of work. Never on the critical path. You should be able to read the code and hold a real design conversation, because that's how you'll earn the respect of strong senior engineers. This role isn't: the team's technical decision-maker of record. Deep technical ownership of each domain sits with the senior engineers on the IC track, and you'll partner with them rather than outrank them on architecture. You also won't be leading individual projects from a technical perspective. If what you actually want is to own architecture and ship features as your primary contribution, this is the wrong role and we'd rather tell you now.

WHAT YOU'LL FOCUS ON

• Manage the engineers on Admin and CORE: regular one-on-ones, career growth plans, and direct, useful performance feedback. Engineers on both teams report to you for growth and performance.
• Own capacity and staffing across both teams: who's working on what, where we're thin, and what we do about it.
• Partner with the Product Managers on delivery, sequencing, and trade-offs, and with the senior engineers on scoping and quality.
• Partner with other EMs on cross-team initiatives and collaboration.
• Help define and grow technical leadership on the IC track. Our career framework is being built this autumn, and you'll shape how technical leadership works here rather than inheriting someone else's version of it.
• Hire. You'll shape and run hiring for your teams as we grow.
• Remove bottlenecks: fewer decisions routed upward, more teams that can run themselves.
• Help build our career framework. We're putting the first proper version together this autumn, aiming for "good enough, safe enough to try" rather than perfect, and you'll have real input into it.

BEING STRAIGHT ABOUT THE STAGE WE'RE AT

We're mid-way through defining our engineering structure, and we'd rather you know that going in.

• The IC and management tracks are being separated properly right now. You'll help finish that work rather than inherit a finished version of it.
• Our teams are currently sliced by product surface (Admin, CORE, POS, app). Over the next year we're moving toward teams that own a full customer journey end to end, organised by customer segment: hospitality, schools, and so on. Your scope will shift as that happens.
• We care much more about someone who recognises these problems and wants to solve them than about someone matching a title on a ladder we haven't finished drawing.

THE PRACTICAL DETAILS

• You'll manage: the Admin and CORE teams, roughly 10 engineers on day one across both.
• You'll report to: the VP of Engineering.
• You'll work with: a Product Manager on each team, our design team, and the other Engineering Manager (covering POS and app).
• Process: intro call → technical and leadership deep-dive → team meeting → offer

OUR CURRENT STACK

You won't be the primary architect, but you do need to be able to hold a real technical conversation and read the code.

• Languages: TypeScript-first across the stack.
• Frontend: Next.js and related React tooling.
• Backend & data: Node.js services, Firestore as the primary operational database, PostgreSQL as our analytical store.
• Cloud: GCP (Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Functions, Firestore, Cloud Storage).
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Vercel, container pipelines.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Must-haves

• Experience managing a team of engineers, including the parts people avoid: performance conversations, growth plans, and honest feedback.
• Genuine motivation for people management. You measure your work by what your team ships and how your engineers develop, not by your own commits.
• Technically credible with a hands-on engineering background, ideally in TypeScript/Node.js. You can review a design, challenge a plan, and contribute to a project definition.
• Comfortable operating without a playbook. We don't have a mature EM function, a finished career ladder, or a settled team topology. You'll help write all three.
• A track record of partnering closely with Product, and of pushing back well when scope and capacity don't match.
• Excellent communicator across a distributed team in several countries.
• Thrives in a growing scaleup: pragmatic, autonomous, low ego.

Nice to have

• Experience establishing an EM function or management layer where there wasn't one before.
• Experience coaching senior engineers into technical leadership, and keeping the IC track a genuinely attractive option.
• Background with highly configurable, multi-tenant back-office or admin systems, with many integration points and configuration paths.
• Experience with GCP (Firestore, Cloud Run, or similar managed services).
• Experience in food service, retail, or another operationally complex industry.

WHAT WE OFFER

• The chance to build an engineering management function from the ground up, on platforms used daily by kitchen chefs and account managers at customers across Europe and the US.
• Flexible hours and the choice to work from Aarhus, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, or London, or fully remote anywhere in Europe.
• A supportive engineering team that values learning and teaching.
• An annual company-wide getaway, plus an annual product team getaway focused on strategy and cross-team collaboration, alongside regular cross-office collaboration day to day.
• A company computer, insurance coverage based on your country of employment, and retailer discounts.
• Real influence over how engineering at Kanpla is organised, not just how two teams are run.

OUR CULTURE

We move quickly but responsibly. We value curiosity, ownership, and continuous learning. We want someone who'll raise the bar technically and socially, and who'll be thoughtful about adopting new technologies, including AI tooling in our own engineering workflows. We encourage applications from candidates of all genders and backgrounds. If you're excited by the role but don't match every bullet above, please apply.

HOW TO APPLY

Please apply through [