Senior Backend Engineering Manager

Job description

As Senior Backend Engineering Manager at StrangeBee, you will lead a cross-functional team of 6 to 8 engineers working on our incident response platform, TheHive. Your role is not to be the best developer in the room — it’s to create the conditions for the team to be collectively excellent. You will drive people development, facilitate technical decision-making, and ensure smooth cross-team collaboration in a fast-moving cybersecurity environment.

Responsibilities

Leadership \& people development

• Run regular 1:1s and structured feedback sessions to support each engineer’s growth and identify development opportunities.

• Recruit, onboard, and develop talent, with a strong focus on team culture.

• Foster autonomy and ownership: encourage engineers to surface blockers, propose solutions, and continuously improve their practices.

• Create an environment where healthy technical debate and constructive feedback thrive.

• Build bridges between engineers working across different product areas.

Technical decision support \& autonomy

• Facilitate (rather than make) complex technical decisions: ask the right questions, structure options, and align perspectives.

• Help the team develop its own technical judgment rather than creating dependency on your expertise.

• Act as a sparring partner for tech leads and senior engineers on topics of architecture, quality, and engineering practices.

• Champion a culture of continuous improvement: retrospectives, knowledge sharing, and thoughtful adoption of new tools, including AI in development workflows.

Cross-team coordination \& alignment

• Serve as the primary point of contact for teams collaborating with engineering.

• Proactively identify dependencies, risks, and inter-team friction points, and address them before they become blockers.

• Communicate a clear picture of the platform’s technical state and improvement areas to relevant stakeholders.

• Promote consistency in technical practices across teams, without imposing a top-down vision.

What success looks like (6–12 months)

• The team makes technical decisions autonomously, with confidence and a structured approach.

• Engineers visibly grow: skills develop, initiative increases, engagement strengthens.

• Cross-team collaboration is smooth: other teams know who to reach out to, and blockers are resolved quickly.

• Quality practices are owned by the team itself, not imposed from the outside.

• Technical debt is mapped and clearly communicated to stakeholders.

• The team delivers on time.

Requirements

Technical skills

• Solid backend engineering culture: web architecture, APIs, databases, and feature lifecycle.

• Ability to understand technical challenges without necessarily being a hands-on expert in all of them.

• Strong understanding of quality practices: testing, CI/CD, code reviews, and technical debt management.

• Comfortable with Git and continuous integration tooling.

• Genuine interest in AI and its practical applications in software development.

Leadership \& soft skills

• Clear communicator, both written and verbal, across multi-team and multi-stakeholder contexts.

• Trust builder: able to create a safe environment where people feel empowered to speak up, take risks, learn, and grow.

• Autonomy enabler: knows when to guide, when to question, and when to step back.

• Influential without direct authority: able to align and convince without relying on hierarchy.

• Decision facilitator: structures debates, clarifies options, and helps the team choose without choosing for them.

• Adaptable in a fast-moving environment with varied stakeholders.

• Forward-thinking: able to give meaning to the team’s work and project a mid-term vision.

• Data-driven mindset: relies on concrete indicators to steer priorities and measure progress.

Stack \& Tools

Golang, GitHub Actions, Temporal, PostgreSQL, sqlc, Docker, OpenAPI

You might feel hesitant to apply if you don’t match 100% of the requirements. This list is a guide, we encourage you to apply even if you are a partial match. We are building teams that innovate, not teams that simply tick every box**.

Hiring process

We aim to keep our process transparent, structured, and respectful of your time.

1. Discovery call with the hiring team (30 minutes)

A first conversation to understand your background, motivations, and answer your initial questions.

1. Technical interview with a team member (1 hour)

A practical discussion to explore your engineering culture, approach to technical challenges, and day-to-day collaboration style.

1. Interview with the hiring manager (1h30)

Deep dive into your experience, leadership philosophy, and role expectations.

1. AssessFirst personality assessment

A short online assessment to help us understand how you work and how you might thrive within the team.

1. Interview with the Head of HR (30 minutes)

Discussion around vision, culture fit, and long-term alignment.

Please note we may conduct a reference check before finalizing the offer.

About us

StrangeBee is a European cybersecurity software company specializing in Incident Response.

Founded in 2018 by the creators of TheHive and Cortex, StrangeBee was built on the success of these tools that quickly became widely adopted within the cybersecurity community. What started as open-source initiatives evolved into enterprise-grade solutions trusted by organizations worldwide.

Today, TheHive is recognized as a leading incident response platform, empowering thousands of security analysts to detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats efficiently.

StrangeBee now operates as a fully commercial software vendor, focused on delivering robust, scalable, and continuously evolving solutions tailored to the needs of modern security teams.

Our ambition is clear: strengthen our product ecosystem, meet the fast-growing demands of the cybersecurity market, and establish StrangeBee as a global leader in incident response platforms.

We are growing fast and we’re looking for people who want to grow with us.

Why join us

At StrangeBee, you won’t just join a company, you’ll help shape a growing European cybersecurity leader.

What makes us different is not only what we build, but how we build it.

Customer Centric

Everything we do starts with impact. We build for real security teams facing real threats. We listen carefully, challenge assumptions, and aim to deeply understand the “why” behind every need. If you care about delivering meaningful value, not just shipping features, you’ll feel at home here.

Quest for Excellence

“Good enough” is not our standard. We continuously question how we work, how we collaborate, and how we improve our product. Excellence for us means rigor, accountability, and pride in craftsmanship, whether in code, sales conversations, customer support, or internal processes.

Embrace Change

Cybersecurity evolves constantly, so do we. We encourage initiative, ideas, and constructive challenge. If you see something that could be better, you’re expected to speak up and help drive improvement. Change is not something we endure; it’s something we actively shape.

One Team

We believe performance comes from trust. We foster open communication, mutual respect, and psychological safety. Everyone’s voice matters, and collaboration goes beyond titles or departments. We succeed together.

Joining StrangeBee means working in an environment where ownership is real, standards are high, and impact is visible, while being part of a team that genuinely supports each other.

Cobol, GIT, PostgreSQL, Engineering

StrangeBee is a European cybersecurity software company specializing in Incident Response.

Founded in 2018 by the creators of TheHive and Cortex, StrangeBee was built on the success of these tools that quickly became widely adopted within the cybersecurity community. What started as open-source initiatives evolved into enterprise-grade solutions trusted by organizations worldwide.

Today, TheHive is recognized as a leading incident response platform, empowering thousands of security analysts to detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats efficiently.

StrangeBee now operates as a fully commercial software vendor, focused on delivering robust, scalable, and continuously evolving solutions tailored to the needs of modern security teams.

Our ambition is clear: strengthen our product ecosystem, meet the fast-growing demands of the cybersecurity market, and establish StrangeBee as a global leader in incident response platforms.

We are growing fast and we’re looking for people who want to grow with us., At StrangeBee, you won’t just join a company, you’ll help shape a growing European cybersecurity leader.

What makes us different is not only what we build, but how we build it.

Customer Centric

Everything we do starts with impact. We build for real security teams facing real threats. We listen carefully, challenge assumptions, and aim to deeply understand the “why” behind every need. If you care about delivering meaningful value, not just shipping features, you’ll feel at home here.

Quest for Excellence

“Good enough” is not our standard. We continuously question how we work, how we collaborate, and how we improve our product. Excellence for us means rigor, accountability, and pride in craftsmanship, whether in code, sales conversations, customer support, or internal processes.

Embrace Change

Cybersecurity evolves constantly, so do we. We encourage initiative, ideas, and constructive challenge. If you see something that could be better, you’re expected to speak up and help drive improvement. Change is not something we endure; it’s something we actively shape.

One Team

We believe performance comes from trust. We foster open communication, mutual respect, and psychological safety. Everyone’s voice matters, and collaboration goes beyond titles or departments. We succeed together.

Joining StrangeBee means working in an environment where ownership is real, standards are high, and impact is visible, while being part of a team that genuinely supports each other.