Engineering Manager, Kafka

As an Engineering Manager for the Kafka team, you will lead an engineering team responsible for providing managed services, tooling, and standards for multiple Vinted product teams that need asynchronous message processing. This spans the full scope of the domain - from operating infrastructure and running Kafka clusters across multiple data centers, to abstracting complex systems into easy-to-use managed services that support core Vinted operations at scale.

Your main responsibility will be the health, morale, and efficiency of your team, ensuring they successfully operate and grow parts of the platform while developing "golden paths" for product developers.

The newly established Kafka team in the Persistence domain currently consists of 5 experienced engineers, with plans to grow further. In this role, you will report to the Director of Engineering and form a strong leadership partnership with the team's Staff Engineer, who leads deep technical architecture and technology choices, and Technical Program Manager (TPM), who drives cross-team delivery and roadmap alignment. Together, you will empower the team to deliver reliable, high-quality services to Vinted's wider development organization.

In this position, you’ll

• Lead and develop a team of 5+ infrastructure engineers, driving individual goal setting, regular feedback cycles, and quarterly performance reviews.
• Build individual career development plans, mentoring engineers to reach their potential and supporting team growth.
• Keep track of team health, delivery velocity, and operational workload to prevent burnout and ensure a sustainable pace.
• Create, refine, and take accountability for efficient operational procedures, agile workflows, incident response routines, and on-call practices.
• Help unblock engineers, resolve cross-team dependencies, and foster strong collaboration with peer platform teams.
• Participate in engineering management rituals, organizational planning, post-incident reviews, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Oversee team execution, capacity planning, and hiring efforts as the team expands.
• Work with the Staff Engineer and TPM to turn technical strategy into well-structured roadmaps, clear team priorities, and predictable delivery.
• Communicate with internal stakeholders and development teams across Vinted to ensure transparent service expectations, SLAs, and roadmap visibility.
• Ensure the team delivers eventually consistent systems that keep data synchronized across cross-Atlantic markets without sacrificing performance.
• Focus on your team's and your own professional and personal growth, including conducting performance and compensation reviews.

• Have experience managing, coaching, and developing software and/or infrastructure engineering teams, with a track record of delivering results.
• Have a strong understanding of goal-setting frameworks, performance review cycles, continuous feedback, and career growth pathways for engineers.
• Are comfortable collaborating in a leadership triad, partnering closely with a Staff Engineer on technical decisions and a TPM on program execution.
• Are skilled at creating structured workflows, clarifying team ownership, facilitating constructive discussions, and managing stakeholder expectations.
• Care deeply about people development, psychological safety, a healthy on-call culture, and team satisfaction.
• Are well-versed in high-level software engineering and platform concepts, enabling you to communicate effectively with technical specialists without needing to be hands-on.
• Communicate excellently in written and spoken English.

Nice to have

• Experience working within platform, infrastructure, SRE, or cloud organizations.
• Experience working within Apache Kafka or similar platforms.
• Experience establishing or improving on-call rotations, incident post-mortem processes, or service-level management.

• The opportunity to benefit from our share options programme
• 25 working days of holiday
• Access to all the tools & tech needed for work
• Home office support: we provide IT workstation equipment and a personal budget of up to 540 for home workplace furniture
• Private health insurance
• Confidential Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for you and your family
• Frequent team-building events
• A personal monthly budget for shopping on Vinted
• A dog-friendly office
• In Vilnius office: gym & in-house meals at friendly prices
• In Kaunas office: a monthly lunch allowance, and a once-a-week provided in-house lunch and breakfast