Engineering Manager

Location: Liège (Hybrid)
Contract: Freelance or Permanent
Language: English
Department: Product Engineering
Reporting to: Head of Engineering (per Area)
Team: One Product Engineering Team (4–6 engineers)
Level: 4+

Koda Staff is working exclusively with GAMING1 to hire multiple Engineering Managers (approximately 8 profiles) as part of a broader transformation project.

Each Engineering Manager leads a single, autonomous product engineering team, working closely with a dedicated Product Manager and Area Domain Architect. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who enjoys being close to the code, the people, and the product — enabling teams to deliver meaningful customer and business value in short, iterative cycles.

---

The Opportunity

As an Engineering Manager, you will create the conditions for a product engineering team to perform at its best by:

• Delivering high-quality outcomes incrementally

• Learning and adapting quickly through experimentation

• Making autonomous decisions within clear architectural and organisational guardrails

• Operating in a psychologically safe, improvement-driven environment

You will operate close to the team, the code, and the product, balancing technical contribution, people leadership, and outcome focus.

This role explicitly does not own delivery planning or project management.

---

Your Mission

• Enable a product engineering team to consistently deliver customer and business value

• Maintain strong engineering quality, sustainability, and team health

• Help the team focus on outcomes rather than output

• Continuously improve how the team works, learns, and collaborates

You will also ensure the team progressively adopts modern engineering practices and tooling — including AI-assisted engineering approaches — when they clearly improve quality, speed, or developer experience.

---

Key Responsibilities

1. Technical & Engineering Leadership (approx. 30–50% hands-on)

• Actively contribute to the codebase (features, refactoring, spikes, reviews, bug fixing)

• Participate in and facilitate technical design discussions

• Collaborate closely with the Area Domain Architect to co-create and validate solutions

• Ensure strong engineering practices across:

  • Testing and testability

  • Code quality and maintainability

  • Observability, performance, and security

• Encourage pragmatic technical decision-making within established architectural guardrails

• Promote responsible use of automation and AI-assisted tooling

Focus: quality, pragmatism, and learning through real engineering work.

---

2. People Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, coach, and mentor engineers with a strong focus on:

  • Ownership and accountability

  • Collaboration and feedback

  • Continuous learning and improvement

• Run regular 1-on-1s focused on growth, motivation, and well-being

• Create space for senior engineers to mentor others and grow leadership skills

• Foster a psychologically safe environment where experimentation and constructive challenge are encouraged

• Actively support hiring, onboarding, and continuous performance conversations

The Engineering Manager enables expertise to emerge and scale — they do not need to be the most senior specialist in every domain.

---

3. Product & Increment Focus

• Partner closely with the Product Manager to:

  • Clearly frame problems and opportunities

  • Define scope, experiments, and success signals per increment

  • Keep the team focused on outcomes and customer impact

• Encourage short feedback loops, experimentation, validation, and iterative delivery

• Support exploration of AI-enabled product capabilities where they enhance customer experience or operational efficiency

• Protect team focus and flow without introducing heavy planning or bureaucracy

Outcome: fast learning, validated progress, and sustainable delivery.

---

4. Autonomy, Collaboration & Ways of Working

• Enable team autonomy within clear boundaries and expectations

• Create clarity around team ownership and interfaces with other teams

• Collaborate across Product Engineering to share learning and best practices

• Contribute to continuous improvement of:

  • Engineering practices

  • Tooling and workflows

  • Cross-team collaboration

Principle in action: autonomy with alignment.

---

What This Role Is Not

To set clear expectations, this role is not:

• A delivery or project management role

• A full-time people manager detached from the code

• An architectural gatekeeper

• A planning or coordination function

The Engineering Manager’s role is to create the conditions for a small product team to excel, learn, and deliver value sustainably.

---

Position in the Organisation

Engineering Manager

• Co-leads the product team with the Product Manager

• Focuses on execution enablement, coaching, quality, and outcomes

Head of Engineering (per Area)

• Co-leads the area with the Head of Product

• Owns strategy, resourcing, and accountability

Area Domain Architect

• Ensures architectural coherence

• Partners with Engineers and Engineering Managers on solution validation

---

Growth & Career Path

The Engineering Manager role exists at multiple levels (e.g. L4A, L4B, L5).
Progression is evaluated on Knowledge, Leadership, Business Impact, and Adaptability, including the ability to grow teams and operate effectively in changing contexts.

---

Interested in learning more?

Koda Staff is managing this search exclusively on behalf of GAMING1.
As part of a wider scale-up, we are currently hiring approximately 8 Engineering Managers across multiple product areas.

If this role aligns with your experience — or you’d like a confidential conversation to explore fit — apply directly or contact us to discuss which team and scope could be the best match.