Engineering Manager

仕事概要

Digital advertising operates at a massive scale and faces increasingly sophisticated threats. At Spider AF, we build systems that detect and prevent these threats in real time, protecting businesses and customers in production environments where reliability, performance, and security matter every day. As AI agents and automated traffic grow fast, trust and fraud protection matter more than ever, and we are opening our fraud-judgment technology beyond ad fraud.

Our engineering team of around twenty people works across Tokyo and Lisbon on one shared codebase, async-first, in regular delivery cycles. This role extends our people management to support people and team growth, performance, and delivery. Technical direction stays with our Tech Leads and senior engineers.

As an Engineering Manager, you are responsible for the performance, growth, and accountability of your direct reports. You start with a group of four, and we expect it to grow from there, depending on your experience and on what the team needs. You own their goals, their feedback, their reviews, their onboarding, and their progression, and you make sure that what they commit to gets finished: released, validated in real conditions, and adopted.

Your focus is people development and team delivery. You will be asked to understand the product, the engineering flows, and how decisions get made well enough to take part in those decisions, challenge them with evidence, and carry them to your team. We expect you to make decisions, not route them: on priorities inside your group, on who does what, and on when to escalate. Delivery is a shared responsibility: you will work closely with Product, Design, Infra and Ops, and the rest of the engineering team to get your group’s commitments over the line. Engineering at Spider AF is moving to an AI-native, agent-enabled way of working, and managers lead that shift in their own teams. We hold a high bar for engineering excellence, meaning code quality, testing, reliability, security and operational maturity, delivered at speed. Your reports are held to it, and you are accountable for a pace of delivery that never comes at its expense.

We welcome people who come from a technical role in software product development, such as software engineer, QA or test engineer, sales or solutions engineer, or product owner, and who have since spent at least a couple of years on the management track: leading a team, a project, or a delivery stream with responsibility for the people doing the work, or managing direct reports. Whether you have owned every people process already or are ready to take the rest on, you have led people, carried results, and want to make people management your job. You will report to the Director of Engineering, who will support you with complex people situations and performance decisions, and help you build out any part of the management practice you have not owned yet. Success is measured by your reports’ growth and the outcomes they deliver, and by how much better your group works each cycle.

Key Responsibilities
People Development
- Own the performance and growth of your direct reports through clear expectations, continuous feedback, and structured development.
- Hold weekly 1:1s that create space for feedback, development, motivation, and concerns, alongside goals and blockers.
- Own each report’s Role & Responsibilities document and keep it current as the baseline for their goals, reviews, and development plan. Review progress every cycle and revisit the development plan every quarter.
- Prepare and deliver fair, specific, evidence-based performance reviews. Gather feedback from the people who work with each report, including Tech Leads and Maintainers, and calibrate your assessment with the Director of Engineering and the other engineering leads.
- Own onboarding for new joiners in your group: a clear plan, appropriate early assignments, buddy support, and probation reviews at one, two, and three months.

Performance Management and Team Ownership
- Build a group that operates with strong ownership, accountability, and increasing autonomy in execution and decision-making.
- Address performance gaps early with specific feedback, agreed actions, and follow-up. When coaching is not changing outcomes within a cycle, make a decision, with the Director of Engineering’s support, rather than repeat the conversation.
- Pay attention to workload, health, and motivation signals, and raise them early so that assignments and expectations can be adjusted with both the person and the project in view.
- Delegate ownership and follow through on commitments. Use retrospectives and postmortems as tools to improve continuously, and help the group keep improving how it works.
- Recognize contributions, encourage learning and shared ownership, and build trust and inclusion across Tokyo, Lisbon, and remote.

Delivery Accountability and Decision-Making
- Help your reports make realistic commitments and deliver on them. Make goals, progress, and risks visible early to technical and non-technical stakeholders, and raise emerging concerns early, with the options you see, even when the answer is not yet clear.
- Work with Product, Design, Infra and Ops, Tech Leads, and the other engineering managers to align priorities, capacity, and individual goals, resolve blockers between teams, and plan handovers and leave coverage.
- Learn the product, the customer problems, and the engineering practices in place, so that you can contribute to prioritization and planning discussions and support those practices in your team.
- Bring your read on people, capacity, and risk into leadership conversations, and support the decisions once they are made.
- Hold your group to the engineering standards set by the Tech Leads and Maintainers, including PR quality, testing, review, risk assessment and deploy plans, and treat speed and quality as one target rather than a trade-off.
- Own the incident process in your group’s scope: every incident is registered regardless of impact, treated as the top priority, and closed with a blameless postmortem that asks where the problem should have been caught, with actions tracked to completion like any other commitment. Technical root cause and remediation stay with the Tech Leads and the Maintainers group.

AI-First Ways of Working
- Use AI tools in your own management practice from the start: preparing 1:1s, collecting review evidence, tracking delivery signals, and drafting plans and assessments.
- Make AI part of your reports’ daily engineering work, shape how work in your group is distributed between people and agents, and turn individual productivity gains into team practice.
- Deliver at least one change each quarter to how your group works that uses AI or automation, with a measurable effect on speed, quality, or predictability.

We believe strong managers thrive when given real ownership and clear expectations. We value managers who listen actively, give direct, kind, and actionable feedback early and often, are pragmatic in their decisions, believe in continuous improvement for their people and for how the team works, treat retrospectives and incidents as learning rather than blame, and are willing to step outside their comfort zone to keep learning people leadership through real experience and reflection.

This is a low-drama, high-trust environment where ownership, clarity, and impact matter more than following the process.

How We Define “Done”
For us, a manager’s work goes beyond running the rituals. “Done” is a progression:

released → validated → adopted

You make sure your reports own their work through all three stages, and that misses are surfaced and addressed, not absorbed.

Managers who consider their job done when the 1:1s have happened and the reviews have been written, rather than when their people are delivering and growing, will likely find this role frustrating. If you measure your work by whether your people are delivering and growing, this role will suit you, and you will grow fast here.

How We Set Expectations
We run a performance review every quarter, based on outcomes. Every engineer at Spider AF has a yearly Role & Responsibilities document: what the role is, its core responsibilities, the goals and KPIs for the fiscal year, and what the following year should look like. It is the baseline for the quarterly performance reviews. You will own the R&R for each of your reports, and your own R&R, agreed with the Director of Engineering in your first weeks, is the baseline this role is evaluated against. Expectations rise over time: each year’s R&R builds on the last, for your reports and for you.

必須スキル

Digital advertising operates at a massive scale and faces increasingly sophisticated threats. At Spider AF, we build systems that detect and prevent these threats in real time, protecting businesses and customers in production environments where reliability, performance, and security matter every day. As AI agents and automated traffic grow fast, trust and fraud protection matter more than ever, and we are opening our fraud-judgment technology beyond ad fraud.

Our engineering team of around twenty people works across Tokyo and Lisbon on one shared codebase, async-first, in regular delivery cycles. This role extends our people management to support people and team growth, performance, and delivery. Technical direction stays with our Tech Leads and senior engineers.

As an Engineering Manager, you are responsible for the performance, growth, and accountability of your direct reports. You start with a group of four, and we expect it to grow from there, depending on your experience and on what the team needs. You own their goals, their feedback, their reviews, their onboarding, and their progression, and you make sure that what they commit to gets finished: released, validated in real conditions, and adopted.

Your focus is people development and team delivery. You will be asked to understand the product, the engineering flows, and how decisions get made well enough to take part in those decisions, challenge them with evidence, and carry them to your team. We expect you to make decisions, not route them: on priorities inside your group, on who does what, and on when to escalate. Delivery is a shared responsibility: you will work closely with Product, Design, Infra and Ops, and the rest of the engineering team to get your group’s commitments over the line. Engineering at Spider AF is moving to an AI-native, agent-enabled way of working, and managers lead that shift in their own teams. We hold a high bar for engineering excellence, meaning code quality, testing, reliability, security and operational maturity, delivered at speed. Your reports are held to it, and you are accountable for a pace of delivery that never comes at its expense.

We welcome people who come from a technical role in software product development, such as software engineer, QA or test engineer, sales or solutions engineer, or product owner, and who have since spent at least a couple of years on the management track: leading a team, a project, or a delivery stream with responsibility for the people doing the work, or managing direct reports. Whether you have owned every people process already or are ready to take the rest on, you have led people, carried results, and want to make people management your job. You will report to the Director of Engineering, who will support you with complex people situations and performance decisions, and help you build out any part of the management practice you have not owned yet. Success is measured by your reports’ growth and the outcomes they deliver, and by how much better your group works each cycle.

Key Responsibilities
People Development
- Own the performance and growth of your direct reports through clear expectations, continuous feedback, and structured development.
- Hold weekly 1:1s that create space for feedback, development, motivation, and concerns, alongside goals and blockers.
- Own each report’s Role & Responsibilities document and keep it current as the baseline for their goals, reviews, and development plan. Review progress every cycle and revisit the development plan every quarter.
- Prepare and deliver fair, specific, evidence-based performance reviews. Gather feedback from the people who work with each report, including Tech Leads and Maintainers, and calibrate your assessment with the Director of Engineering and the other engineering leads.
- Own onboarding for new joiners in your group: a clear plan, appropriate early assignments, buddy support, and probation reviews at one, two, and three months.

Performance Management and Team Ownership
- Build a group that operates with strong ownership, accountability, and increasing autonomy in execution and decision-making.
- Address performance gaps early with specific feedback, agreed actions, and follow-up. When coaching is not changing outcomes within a cycle, make a decision, with the Director of Engineering’s support, rather than repeat the conversation.
- Pay attention to workload, health, and motivation signals, and raise them early so that assignments and expectations can be adjusted with both the person and the project in view.
- Delegate ownership and follow through on commitments. Use retrospectives and postmortems as tools to improve continuously, and help the group keep improving how it works.
- Recognize contributions, encourage learning and shared ownership, and build trust and inclusion across Tokyo, Lisbon, and remote.

Delivery Accountability and Decision-Making
- Help your reports make realistic commitments and deliver on them. Make goals, progress, and risks visible early to technical and non-technical stakeholders, and raise emerging concerns early, with the options you see, even when the answer is not yet clear.
- Work with Product, Design, Infra and Ops, Tech Leads, and the other engineering managers to align priorities, capacity, and individual goals, resolve blockers between teams, and plan handovers and leave coverage.
- Learn the product, the customer problems, and the engineering practices in place, so that you can contribute to prioritization and planning discussions and support those practices in your team.
- Bring your read on people, capacity, and risk into leadership conversations, and support the decisions once they are made.
- Hold your group to the engineering standards set by the Tech Leads and Maintainers, including PR quality, testing, review, risk assessment and deploy plans, and treat speed and quality as one target rather than a trade-off.
- Own the incident process in your group’s scope: every incident is registered regardless of impact, treated as the top priority, and closed with a blameless postmortem that asks where the problem should have been caught, with actions tracked to completion like any other commitment. Technical root cause and remediation stay with the Tech Leads and the Maintainers group.

AI-First Ways of Working
- Use AI tools in your own management practice from the start: preparing 1:1s, collecting review evidence, tracking delivery signals, and drafting plans and assessments.
- Make AI part of your reports’ daily engineering work, shape how work in your group is distributed between people and agents, and turn individual productivity gains into team practice.
- Deliver at least one change each quarter to how your group works that uses AI or automation, with a measurable effect on speed, quality, or predictability.

We believe strong managers thrive when given real ownership and clear expectations. We value managers who listen actively, give direct, kind, and actionable feedback early and often, are pragmatic in their decisions, believe in continuous improvement for their people and for how the team works, treat retrospectives and incidents as learning rather than blame, and are willing to step outside their comfort zone to keep learning people leadership through real experience and reflection.

This is a low-drama, high-trust environment where ownership, clarity, and impact matter more than following the process.

How We Define “Done”
For us, a manager’s work goes beyond running the rituals. “Done” is a progression:

released → validated → adopted

You make sure your reports own their work through all three stages, and that misses are surfaced and addressed, not absorbed.

Managers who consider their job done when the 1:1s have happened and the reviews have been written, rather than when their people are delivering and growing, will likely find this role frustrating. If you measure your work by whether your people are delivering and growing, this role will suit you, and you will grow fast here.

How We Set Expectations
We run a performance review every quarter, based on outcomes. Every engineer at Spider AF has a yearly Role & Responsibilities document: what the role is, its core responsibilities, the goals and KPIs for the fiscal year, and what the following year should look like. It is the baseline for the quarterly performance reviews. You will own the R&R for each of your reports, and your own R&R, agreed with the Director of Engineering in your first weeks, is the baseline this role is evaluated against. Expectations rise over time: each year’s R&R builds on the last, for your reports and for you.

歓迎スキル

- Engineering or leadership experience in a SaaS or product company.
- Experience in the ad tech, ad fraud prevention, or cybersecurity industry.
- Experience in a distributed team spanning Japan and Europe.
- Familiarity with Elixir, Phoenix, or functional programming.
- Experience running 1:1s, performance reviews, or onboarding for the people you led, or working within structured review and growth-path systems.

求める人物像

You will do your best work with us if:
- You like to own outcomes and make decisions, not wait to be told each step. When you raise a problem, you bring a possible solution.
- You enjoy a fast-moving team with open, direct feedback, and you see feedback as a way to grow.
- You want your work judged on real results. We run a performance review every quarter, based on outcomes.
- You stay calm when priorities change, and you keep clear communication with your teams.
If this is how you work best, this role will suit you - and you will grow fast here.

応募概要

給与

勤務地

107-0062 Tokyo, Minato City, Minamiaoyama, 7 Chome−10−3 Minami Aoyama St Building 4th Floor

雇用形態

Full-time

勤務体系

-Work Location
* Tokyo Office (In-person rule applies)
* Hybrid Work: 4 days in-office / 1 day remote per week
- Job Type: Full-time (Regular Employee)
- Work Hours: Flextime System (Core Hours: 10:00 - 17:00)
- Holidays: Complete 2-day weekend policy (Sat/Sun), National Holidays
* Vacation Leave (3 additional paid days off)
* Year-End & New Year Holidays
* Annual Paid Leave
* Compassionate Leave
* Childcare Leave
* Welcome Leave (2 days of immediate leave granted upon joining prior to formal paid leave eligibility after 6 months)
* Vaccination Leave
- Probation Period: 3 Months

試用期間

3 months, What Success Looks Like in the First 6 Months In your first months, you will build relationships, learn the product and ways of working, and take increasing ownership of your group with support from the Director of Engineering. A successful start typically includes: - Your reports have a current R&R, clear goals each cycle, regular feedback, and a development plan, and show increasing ownership and autonomy. - You have completed one scheduled performance review round for your group, with specific, evidence-based assessments calibrated with engineering leadership. - You surface delivery, performance, and workload risks early, follow through on agreed actions, make sure incidents in your group’s scope end in postmortems whose actions get done, and have made at least one call on scope, staffing, or an assignment that you owned end to end. - New joiners in your group receive structured onboarding, clear expectations, and their probation reviews at one, two, and three months. - AI tools are part of how you and your reports work every day, and you have shipped at least one change to the group’s workflow that uses them. - Your own R&R for the year is agreed. By the six-month mark, engineering leadership should trust your read on your team’s capacity, risks, and people, you should be in the room when those decisions are made, and your group should be working measurably better than when you joined.

福利厚生

- Benefits:
* Stock Options
* Annual Salary Review
* Mobile Communication Allowance (JPY 4,200/month)
* Influenza Vaccination Coverage
* Certification/Exam Fee Subsidy
* Babysitter Subsidy (Up to JPY 20,000/month, 50% covered)
* Premium Friday (Team Dinners)
* Gold's Gym Membership Subsidy (JPY 550 per visit)