Engineering Manager

About Arena Club

If you’re fascinated by sports cards and memorabilia, your search ends here. Arena Club is pioneering the collectibles domain by introducing the first-ever digital card show. Spearheaded by 5x World Series Champion Derek Jeter and serial entrepreneur Brian Lee, Arena Club has developed a fully digital marketplace. This innovative platform is built on trust, transparency, and fun, featuring grading & authentication, vaulting, and digital pack openings for collectors to build and showcase their collections in a personalized online showroom from anywhere in the world.

About the Role

We're seeking our first Engineering Manager to open and scale our new London office. This is a foundational leadership role that will shape how we build for years to come. Partnering directly with our CTO, you'll manage our engineering organization, bringing the operational structure, systems, and processes needed to scale a high-performing team to the next level.

You’ll focus on modernizing the entire engineering ecosystem, optimizing costs, and working cross functionally with leadership to improve operational pipelines (engineering pipeline focused on stability and upgrades, and product pipeline focused on feature delivery). This is a rare opportunity to play a key role in how a thriving org operates at a company with real traction, significant backing, and the ambition to redefine an entire industry.

What You'll Do

• Modernization & Cost Efficiency: Spearhead the migration from legacy monolithic systems to modern, scalable architectures, upgrade dev tooling, establish automated end-to-end testing frameworks, and aggressively optimize cloud infrastructure costs
• Technical Execution: Guide architectural decisions and maintain technical standards. While you will primarily focus on leadership, you must be comfortable rolling up your sleeves to write or review code, debug production issues, and prototype new features
• Delivery & Agility: Manage sprint planning, establish execution workflows, and remove blockers. You will ensure the team ships features on schedule without sacrificing quality
• AI Strategy & Integration: Champion the adoption of AI tools and best practices across engineering. Ensure teams are effectively leveraging tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and agentic orchestration platforms in alignment with company standards and continuously raise the bar as the tooling landscape evolvesRoadmap Partnership: Work hand-in-hand with the CTO, Product, Design, and senior leadership to translate business priorities into clear technical milestones
• People Management & Mentorship: Partner with the CTO to manage the health and growth of a 45+ person engineering org. Run effective 1:1’s, build career development frameworks, and drive performance management that elevates talent

Who You Are

You've built or led engineering teams, fundamentally reshaping how they operate, ship, and scale. You know how to bring structure and rigor to a fast-moving org without killing the speed and scrappiness that make startups special. You're obsessed with developer productivity, energized by the AI-assisted development frontier, and you lead with the kind of EQ that earns trust across every level of the org.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience); Master’s degree preferred.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years in a dedicated engineering management role
• Proven track record in managing or overseeing engineering teams through periods of significant growth
• Strong technical foundation in modern tech stacks, distributed systems, and CI/CD; enough to drive architectural discussions with credibility and conviction
• Hands-on experience implementing AI/LLM developer tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate engineering output

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience as a founding or first Engineering Manager hire, or working with leadership to scale an org to 100+ engineers
• Background in marketplace, e-commerce, gaming, or data-intensive consumer-facing tech

The Arena Club Standard

Life at Arena Club isn't for the faint of heart, and that's by design. We're building products and experiences the collectibles world has never seen. This is a proving ground. It demands your best every single day, because anything less means you're falling behind.

From day one, you're in the game. Trusted to deliver, expected to own outcomes, and driven to raise the bar higher than you thought possible. We don't just execute, we innovate, compete, and win together. That's how real breakthroughs happen.

If you want routine or predictability, you won't find it here. But if you're ambitious, relentless, and hungry to prove yourself on a team built to dominate — step into the arena. You'll discover growth and reward here, unlike anywhere else.