Engineering Manager - PHP

About the role

Arbor Education is looking for an Engineering Manager in its Ecosystem engineering area, based in Thiruvananthapuram. The role leads the delivery performance and professional development of engineers, drives team health and engagement, and connects engineering execution with the product roadmap. It is a people leadership and delivery optimisation role, with no direct budget ownership, and covers distributed teams across the UK and Serbia.

Key responsibilities

• Drive delivery performance and predictable execution across multiple product and engineering teams, including planning, estimation, sprint reviews and delivery tracking.
• Partner with Product Managers on priorities and feature roadmaps, and share visibility on progress, risks and dependencies.
• Manage workflow and throughput, establish and improve DORA and SPACE metrics, and embed Agile practices such as Scrum and Kanban.
• Coach, mentor and develop engineers and Technical Leads, conduct performance reviews and foster an inclusive, accountable culture.
• Champion psychological safety, wellbeing and sustainable delivery practices.
• Standardise release management, deployment governance, documentation and testing practices, and work with Staff Engineers and Technical Leads.
• Manage technical dependencies and delivery risks, and represent engineering in leadership forums and external communities.
• Build a unified culture across distributed teams, including offsites and workshops.

Required profile

• Proven experience leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams of at least 5+ engineers (Software Engineering, QA, DevOps).
• Strong people management experience, including coaching, mentoring and performance management.
• Experience with distributed teams across multiple locations and time zones.
• Desirable: previous software engineering or technical leadership background, and experience delivering SaaS, platform or API-driven products.

Required skills

• DORA and SPACE metrics, Scrum and Kanban.
• CI/CD pipelines and continuous delivery.
• Desirable: PHP, Node.js, TypeScript, AWS, Kong API Gateway, SRE and cloud-native technologies.

What we offer

• Flexible work environment (3 days work from office).
• Group term life insurance paid out at 3x annual CTC (Arbor India).
• 32 days holiday (25 annual leave plus 7 companywide days).
• Working hours 9.30 am to 6 pm (8.5 hours only).
• 100% fixed salary, no variable component.