Engineering Manager, Trading

About Katanox

Katanox is building the infrastructure layer for hospitality: software that connects hotels and travel buyers and moves money between them. Our platform brings distribution and payments into one workflow (contracting, connectivity, reconciliation, and settlement), so partners can operate with less fragmentation and fewer manual handoffs.

For engineers, this means building reliable systems that handle complex B2B workflows and real financial constraints, with a focus on data integrity, auditability, security, and operational excellence. We’re headquartered in Amsterdam with hubs in London and New York.

Why join Katanox

• Lead the team at the front of the marketplace: Your team owns the buyer API, contracting, and connectivity. The surface where travel buyers meet our supply, and where most of the platform's complexity lives.

• Build the engineering org with us: You'll be one of our first Engineering Managers. The shape of how we run engineering at Katanox is still being written, and you'll write a meaningful part of it.

• High-trust team, high standards: Direct communication, strong engineering fundamentals, and a bias toward shipping and learning.

• In-person collaboration (hub model): We do our best work together, spending regular time in Amsterdam, London, or New York to move faster and build trust.

• Growth-stage ownership: The surface area is big, the team is lean, and your decisions on hiring, structure, and delivery will shape how we scale.

How we work

A cornerstone of our culture is in‑person collaboration. We follow a “hub” model with unique hubs in Amsterdam, London, and New York, where we regularly collaborate face‑to‑face, onboard customers and colleagues, hold design sessions, and host events.

We do not hire for strictly remote roles. We expect people to spend meaningful time in our hubs because this is how we maintain our culture, build trust, and move quickly together.

We’re also a financially regulated company. That means high standards for security, auditability, and decision-making. This means your work ships with the rigor and reliability you’d expect from systems that move real money.

Our values

At Katanox, our values are the blueprint for how we work together and build our product.

• Team over the individual, no ego: We prioritize the success of the whole team over individual agendas. We win together, share credit, and leave egos at the door.

• Data beats excitement: We welcome bold ideas, but we commit based on evidence. We use data, experimentation, and clear hypotheses to decide what to build.

• Dare to do: We are proactive, take smart risks, and move from talking to doing. We learn by shipping and improve through iteration.

• See it, own it, and close it: When we spot a problem or opportunity, we take responsibility to drive it to completion instead of assuming someone else will.

• We apply radical candor: We care personally and challenge directly. We give and receive honest feedback so we can grow faster as individuals and as a team.

• In person first, call second: We prioritise in‑person collaboration in our hubs to build trust, move quickly, and solve hard problems together.

• Build collaboratively: We actively involve the right people, share context early, and co‑create solutions across teams and disciplines.

• Iterate fast and pragmatically: We ship small, learn quickly, and avoid over‑engineering. We focus on solutions that work in reality, not just in theory.

About the role

You'll manage one of our backend engineering teams, the people who build and operate the services that move money between hotels, travel buyers, and payment networks. Your team's work sits on the critical path: contracting, connectivity, reconciliation, payments. A missed event is a failed reservation or a misrouted payout.

This role is for someone who has done the job before and wants to do it again at a stage where the choices are still load-bearing. You'll own the team's delivery, growth, and standards; partner closely with the CTO and tech leads on technical direction; and have real influence over how engineering scales at Katanox.

You will keep shipping code. Our Engineering Managers spend roughly half their time contributing, and we mean contributing on real, non-trivial work, not picking up leftover tickets. The other half is people, planning, hiring, and the quiet operational work that holds a team together. If you've been looking for a way out of the codebase, this isn't it. If you've been looking for a role where you can lead a team without losing your edge as an engineer, it might be.

What you will work on

• Leading a team of engineers: setting direction, running 1:1s, growing people, managing performance, and holding a high bar without burning the team out.

• Owning delivery end-to-end. You're accountable for what your team ships, how predictable it is, and how reliably it runs in production.

• Contributing as an engineer, around 50% of your time. Designing systems, writing production Kotlin, reviewing PRs, picking up the hard or load-bearing pieces nobody else is well placed to own.

• Partnering with tech leads and the CTO on architecture and roadmap. You don't need to have the strongest opinion in the room, but you do need to make sure the team converges on a good one.

• Hiring. You'll run loops, calibrate interviewers, sell the company to candidates, and have a direct hand in growing your team over the next year.

• Building the operating cadence: planning, reviews, incident response, on-call, retros. The boring stuff that quietly compounds.

• Coaching engineers from mid-level into senior, and senior into staff. Growth conversations, feedback, and career frameworks that are actually used.

• Shaping how we run engineering across Katanox. You'll be one of the first Engineering Managers here, so practices you put in place will outlive your team.

What we are looking for

• 3+ years of engineering management experience, having directly led a team of engineers (not just tech lead or staff-with-reports). You've owned hiring, performance, and delivery, not just standups.

• You've managed through real situations: a missed deadline that mattered, a performance case you handled well, a hire you regretted, an incident at 3am on a Sunday. You can talk about what you learned from each.

• You're still a strong engineer. You can pick up a Kotlin service, navigate it, and ship a meaningful change. You've stayed close enough to the code that PR reviews from you actually move the bar. Ideally you've worked on distributed systems with real availability and consistency requirements.

• You believe managers should code, and you've found a way to do it without dropping the management side. Or you haven't, but you want to, and you have a credible plan for how.

• You hire for craft and curiosity, not credentials, and you've built or rebuilt a team that you'd happily join yourself.

• You take ownership. When something is broken or unclear at the team or org level, you pick it up rather than file it under "someone else's problem."

• You give feedback directly and early. You don't sit on hard conversations.

• You're genuinely interested in the domain. Payments and travel distribution are messy, regulated, and full of edge cases. If that sounds tedious rather than interesting, this probably isn't the right role.

• You believe managing a team works best in person. Trust gets built faster, hard conversations land better, and the small daily moments that actually shape a team only really happen when people are in the room together.

• Fluent in English.

Tech stack snapshot

• Backend: Kotlin, Ktor, Arrow-kt, Jooq, Postgres

• Frontend: React

• Infra: AWS, K8S