Job Description
At Catawiki, every day brings the extraordinary! Whether it’s Daniel Ricciardo’s Formula 1 Car, a Woolly Mammoth’s Skeleton, Lady Gaga’s Jumpsuit or Usain Bolt’s running shoe, we encounter exceptional objects every day.
We’re a one-of-a-kind marketplace for buying and selling special objects. Each week, more than 100,000 unique items are auctioned, all carefully curated by our passionate in-house experts.
Having sold over 25 million unique objects, our mission is to become the world’s most popular destination for special objects. As a growing, diverse and sustainable scale-up, we proudly live by three core values. If these values resonate with you, we’d love to explore how you can join us.
- Taking ownership and driving impact
- Being open to change and feedback
- Being passionate about our mission and our customers.
Your Mission
This core bidding experience team owns services that are central to how customers engage with auctions on our platform. The scope is both technically meaningful and closely tied to the customer experience.
Joining Catawiki as an Engineering Manager means leading a team of engineers across backend and client disciplines while staying close to the technical work. This is not a pure people management role: it requires a strong balance of technical depth, team leadership, and ownership for systems on the critical path.
What You’ll Do
Your work as an Engineering Manager will shape how Catawiki evolves the auction journey, helping the team deliver reliable, thoughtful, and high-impact experiences for bidders and buyers.
- Lead a Business-Critical Team: Support and guide a cross-functional engineering focusing on features and systems powering bidding experience, ensuring the team is aligned around meaningful outcomes.
- Drive the Auction Experience Forward: Guide the team to execute a roadmap focusing on improving the core auction experience
- Stay Close to the Technical Work: Contribute to technical discussions, review pull requests, support system design conversations, and help engineers make sound architectural decisions.
- Strengthen Backend-Centric Systems: Work closely with backend engineers on service design, backend flows, observability, and maintainability, reflecting the team’s backend-heavy setup and responsibilities.
- Create a Healthy, Effective Team Environment: Coach engineers, help them grow, organize the team for success, and support day-to-day collaboration across different engineering disciplines.
- Own Outcomes Proactively: Take responsibility for the health of critical-path systems, help anticipate risks, and make sure technical and team issues are addressed with urgency and care.
What you’ll bring
You measure what matters, stay close to the details when needed, and know when to guide versus when to step in. You are comfortable balancing technical leadership with people leadership, and you care deeply about the team, the systems, and the outcomes they own. Next to this you are:
- Backend-Strong: You bring a strong backend background and are comfortable reasoning about backend services, system flows, architecture, observability, and maintainability.
- Hands-On Technical Leader: You engage in technical discussions, support system design, review engineering work, and partner with engineers on implementation decisions.
- People Manager with Range: 2+ years in people management experience, with a record of navigating topics such as coaching, feedback, team dynamics, and difficult conversations.
- Outcome-Driven: You have a strong bias for action and a track record of setting and delivering against ambitious goals.
- Proactive and Reliable: You stay on top of what is happening in the team and its services, especially when working with systems on the critical path to the business.
- Clear Communicator: You can discuss ideas clearly, facilitate conversations around architecture and trade-offs, and work effectively with engineers and stakeholders across the organisation.
Why You’ll Love Working with Us
- Create a visible impact by working at scale in a global organisation serving millions of customers across 80+ categories. In our flat structure, every role has a broad scope and directly impacts both our customers and the business.
- Learn and grow through our Learning & Development initiatives, including clear development plans and mentorship programmes to support your career progression.
- A culture of connection defines us. We’re a passionate, diverse team of 800+ Catawikians representing 60+ nationalities. We foster an inclusive and queer-friendly environment where everyone is encouraged to bring their full self to work.
- Celebrate life’s moments with us. You’ll receive a €100 Catavoucher when you join, a €50 Catavoucher on your birthday, and an extra day off each year to “Pursue Your Passion ”. We also offer additional leave for key work anniversaries and important life events. Benefits may vary by location.
Our Offices and Way of Working
Our vibrant offices in Amsterdam, Paris and Lisbon are designed to inspire collaboration. Most Catawikians operate in a hybrid setup, combining office-based and remote work, with a minimum of two days per week in the office, unless a role is explicitly stated as fully remote or fully office-based.
Why You’ll Love Working with Us
- Create a visible impact by working at scale in a global organisation serving millions of customers across 80+ categories. In our flat structure, every role has a broad scope and directly impacts both our customers and the business.
- Learn and grow through our Learning & Development initiatives, including clear development plans and mentorship programmes to support your career progression.
- A culture of connection defines us. We’re a passionate, diverse team of 800+ Catawikians representing 60+ nationalities. We foster an inclusive and queer-friendly environment where everyone is encouraged to bring their full self to work.
- Celebrate life’s moments with us. You’ll receive a €100 Catavoucher when you join, a €50 Catavoucher on your birthday, and an extra day off each year to “Pursue Your Passion ”. We also offer additional leave for key work anniversaries and important life events. Benefits may vary by location.
Our Offices and Way of Working
Our vibrant offices in Amsterdam, Paris and Lisbon are designed to inspire collaboration. Most Catawikians operate in a hybrid setup, combining office-based and remote work, with a minimum of two days per week in the office, unless a role is explicitly stated as fully remote or fully office-based.
Interested?
Apply with an English CV and Cover Letter. By applying, you agree to Catawiki’s Applicant Privacy Policy. If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
