About Pliant

Pliant is a European fintech specializing in B2B payment solutions. Our modular, API-first platform helps businesses streamline spending, improve cash flow, and integrate payments into their financial workflows. Designed for industries with complex payment needs, such as travel and fleet, Pliant enables greater efficiency, control, and profitability.

We serve two primary customer segments:

• Companies looking to optimize operational processes through intuitive apps and APIs, gaining control, automation, and financial flexibility through extended credit lines.

• Businesses such as financial software platforms, ERP providers, and banks that want to launch or enhance their credit card offerings using Pliant's embedded finance and white-label solutions.

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Berlin, Pliant supports over 4,500 businesses and more than 20 partners globally. As a licensed e-money institution (EMI), we issue credit cards in 11 currencies across more than 30 countries, helping companies streamline and simplify payments.

About the Role

We're seeking an Engineering Manager (m/f/d, remote/hybrid) to help build and lead a brand-new engineering team focused on Spend Intelligence — the product space where Pliant helps customers understand, optimize, and increasingly automate their spend through insights and AI.

This is an early-stage team-building role. You'll start with a small group of existing engineers and grow the team into a fully-formed product team over the next two to three quarters, together with a Product Manager, a Product Designer, and additional engineers we're hiring in parallel. Initially, you'll be around 50-60% hands-on. Hands-on expectations are intentionally front-loaded and expected to decrease as the team matures. You'll architect scalable, maintainable, and secure solutions while mentoring and developing your team.

You'll collaborate with other (Senior) Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers across PAW (Partners, APIs & Workflows) and the wider Engineering org to define roadmaps, drive execution, and uphold best practices. You'll contribute to the codebase and guide your team in developing innovative solutions for our customers.

You’ll have strong partnership from product and engineering leadership while shaping this new team.

About the Team

Spend Intelligence is a new product team forming in 2026 as part of a strategic restructuring within the group, by splitting an existing team. In the short term, Spend Intelligence focuses on:

• Pliant Assistant, our LLM-powered assistant — evolving it into a high-quality product experience customers genuinely rely on

• AI-driven spend insights and automation — helping customers understand and optimize their spend, and increasingly automating the steps in between

• Receipt management — extracting data and insights from receipts and building automations based on the data

• The supporting AI capabilities currently needed to deliver these features (foundation-model integrations, retrieval, evaluation, agentic patterns, MCPs).

The team starts with one experienced backend engineer, a frontend engineer, a product designer, and you. We're hiring a Product Manager and several engineers to build out the full team over the next quarters.

What You'll Do

• Build and Lead a New Team: Hire, onboard, and grow an interdisciplinary engineering team while staying close to the technology (hands-on in the beginning). Support engineers in a psychologically safe environment through regular performance reviews, clear expectations, and direct and supportive feedback.

• Shape the Product Space: Partner with your Product Manager and Product Designer to define the team's mission, problem space, and OKRs. Help us answer not only "how do we build this" but also "what is worth building".

• Drive Technical Direction for AI-enabled Features: Guide the team through real product questions — when does an LLM actually improve the experience vs. when a deterministic solution serves users better; how do we evaluate quality, ground responses, and contain failure modes; what belongs in our team vs. as a shared platform capability.

• Mentor and Grow Talent: Foster open communication, career development, and engineering excellence by championing best practices like test-driven bug fixing, automated testing, continuous integration and daily deployments to production.

• Collaborate Across Teams: Work closely with peer EMs, our infrastructure team, and our data team to shape clear interfaces and avoid the "AI team owns everything AI" anti-pattern.

• Manage OKRs and Continuous Improvement: Set and track quarterly team OKRs together with the product manager. Promote innovation, knowledge sharing, and ongoing enhancements to maintain a culture of excellence.

• Participate in Hiring and On-Call: Take an active role in interviewing for your team and across Engineering, and join our compensated on-call rotation alongside the team (optional).

• Champion Pliant Values: Embrace and live Pliant's core values — Push It, Own It, Open Up, Be Kind, Have Fun, Be Pliant — while collaborating with peers on company-wide initiatives and fostering a positive team and department culture.

What You'll Bring

• Several years of hands-on backend engineering experience with Java/Kotlin and Spring Boot, plus time spent in a leadership or management role. We generally think in the range of 7+ years total and 2+ years in management, but we care more about depth, judgment, and how you learn than the exact number on your CV.

• Care for engineering craft and the trade-offs behind technical decisions, especially in distributed, testable, and maintainable backend systems.

• Solid working knowledge of REST APIs, relational databases (we use PostgreSQL), and microservices.

• Experience leading teams, mentoring engineers, and helping people grow into the next step in their career.

• Comfort with ambiguity and product-shaped problems — this team is new and needs someone energized by that rather than waiting for things to be fully defined.

• Genuine interest in building user-facing product features and a healthy skepticism toward AI hype. We'd rather ship one thing that quietly works than five things that demo well.

• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to drive projects from concept to completion by leveraging your team's skills.

Bonus Points

• Hands-on experience with LLMs, agents, RAG, evals, MCPs, or shipping production AI features

• Experience starting a team from scratch or splitting an existing team into focused units

• Experience operating in a regulated environment (fintech, healthtech, etc.)

Don't meet every single point on this list? Please apply anyway. Research consistently shows that candidates from underrepresented groups hold themselves to a higher bar and self-select out of roles they'd actually thrive in. If this role excites you and you bring most of what we're looking for, we'd love to hear from you and figure out together whether there's a fit.

What We Offer

• The opportunity to work in a growing team with big responsibilities that thrives on a strong exchange of knowledge and excellence

• Attractive remuneration

• Your choice of preferred hardware: Windows-based laptop or MacBook Pro

• Flat hierarchy and transparent communication in a relaxed, professional atmosphere

• Opportunity to develop your talent in a dynamic team with ambitious goals

• Flexibility and possibility to work remotely

• English as our working language, with colleagues from many different backgrounds and countries

• Company card with a monthly allowance for lunches, coffee, etc. with co-workers

• As an Engineering Manager, you report to the Head of Engineering for the PAW group

Diversity & Inclusion

At Pliant, we believe diversity and inclusion are essential to building not only an innovative product but also an exceptional experience for both our customers and our team. This commitment begins with our hiring process—we welcome individuals of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, religions, national origins, gender identities or expressions, sexual orientations, ages, marital statuses, and abilities. If you require accommodations or accessibility support during the interview process, please let us know in your application so we can make sure your experience is seamless.

We also know that great candidates don't always tick every box on a job description. If this role excites you but your experience doesn't perfectly match every requirement listed, we still encourage you to apply. You might bring strengths, perspectives, or potential we hadn't even thought to ask for—and we'd rather hear from you than miss the chance to meet you.