Pliant is a modular B2B payments platform that combines commercial card issuing, payment accounts, FX, and spend management in one system — adapting to existing setups rather than requiring customers to replace them. Fintechs and software platforms embed Pliant's payment infrastructure into their own products, from API-based Cards-as-a-Service to fully white-label solutions. A principal member of Visa and Mastercard, Pliant issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries — under its own European e‐money license and with licensed partners in the UK and US. We're seeking an Engineering Manager
- Developer Experience (m/f/d) to define and lead a brand-new platform engineering team focused on Developer Experience, the discipline where Pliant ensures every engineer is productive from day one and autonomous from day two. You will be the first hire on the team, which means you get to define what great looks like before hiring the engineers to build it alongside you. You will own the golden path that product teams actually use, CI/CD integrations engineers can modify without raising a ticket, self‐service environment provisioning, and a Service Registry as the canonical source of truth for everything running on Kubernetes. Initially, you will be heavily hands‐on, coding alongside your team, reviewing designs, and making architectural calls. You use AI‐assisted coding tools every day. You know how to coach engineers who haven't made the shift yet, and you're the one who sets the bar for how the team uses them. Pliant is investing heavily in AI tooling and your team will own the company's AI harness so you need to be its most credible user. Build and maintain deployment templates, opinionated CI/CD patterns on top of our Kubernetes cluster APIs, production readiness checklists,
and onboarding flows that get a new service to production without filing a support ticket. Track golden path adoption rate, deployment lead time, and time‐to‐first‐deploy for new services. When engineers route around the platform, that is your problem to diagnose and fix. Standardise AI‐assisted development tooling: Lead the team building the AI harness that standardises the usage of assisted development tools across the company, including Claude Code, Cursor, and others. 4+ years of software development experience with Python, including 2+ years in leadership/management. Hands‐on experience building CI/CD systems, internal developer portals, or golden paths, with enough codebase familiarity to still be useful. You can read a Helm chart, write a Kubernetes admission webhook, and debug a GitHub Actions runner issue. Deep experience with Kubernetes‐based platforms specifically, including cluster APIs, namespaces, RBAC, admission control, and deployment patterns well enough to make informed decisions. ~ You know what "shift left" means and you practice it. ~ The product teams run Java and Kotlin, and they'll come to you when something breaks. You don't need to write Java. You do need to read a stack trace, follow a build log, and tell a configuration issue from a code bug. You are learning where the friction actually is, writing a team charter, interviewing candidates, and probably fixing at least one thing that has been annoying everyone for longer than it should have. By year one the Service Registry is live, golden path adoption is measurable, and your team has a defined roadmap it owns. Tech Stack: Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, Spacelift, GitHub Actions, Datadog. We are in the middle of an ECS‐to‐Kubernetes migration, so there is real new ground to cover from day one. Your choice of preferred OS, Windows or Mac Flexibility and possibility to work remotely
📌 Engineering Manager (Ceuta)
🏢 Pliant
📍 Ceuta