Company Description
TOPdesk builds service management software used across education, healthcare, government, and manufacturing. We are 800+ colleagues in 11 offices worldwide. Founded over 30 years ago, we serve more than 10 million users worldwide and have been helping organisations deliver better services ever since.
We are an open, collaborative organisation with little hierarchy — people own their work end to end and are trusted to make the decisions that matter. We are reinventing ITSM and ESM for the agentic era, building AI agents our customers can trust, and this role is part of that.
Job Description
About the role
As an Engineering Manager, you lead one or two teams with a specific technical mission — front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform — giving both people and technical direction, and owning what your teams ship.
You set team-level technical direction within the wider architectural guardrails, grow strong engineers into stronger ones, and own delivery and operational outcomes — creating the conditions for your senior and staff engineers to provide technical leadership too. You operate agents yourself and lead our AI-native SDLC from the front. You report to your lane's Director of Engineering.
What this is not A purely process or Scrum-master role, or a hands-off manager who sets no technical direction. You lead people and technology together, and stay technically close through design, pairing, incident response, reviews, technical investigation, and agent workflows — regular individual coding output is not the measure of the role.
The team
You lead one or two teams with a specific mission — for example front-end feature development, middleware, back-end services, data, or platform.
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Delivers its part of the lane's roadmap.
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Sets and upholds the technical standards for its domain.
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Adopts the target architecture from the Chief Architect and our AI-native SDLC practices.
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Sits within a approx 170-strong engineering organisation across Delft, Budapest, and Kaiserslautern.
What you'll do
Provide technical direction
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Set technical direction and standards for your teams' domain, alongside your engineers.
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Make and steward the key technical decisions; uphold quality, security, and operational stability.
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Contribute to system and architecture decisions for your domain with the Chief Architect and your peers.
Grow the people
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Coach and develop your engineers — including growing strong ones into senior and staff engineers.
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Hire, and act on tough talent calls with clarity and care.
Own the delivery and the bar
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Own your teams' roadmap commitments and delivery and operational outcomes; protect cycle time, quality, and operational stability.
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Keep review sustainable in an agentic SDLC — ensure your teams do not create excessive review burden or unnecessary code, match agent autonomy to the risk of the task, and keep human accountability clear.
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Raise the engineering bar for your domain; make standards explicit and inspectable.
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Operate agents yourself — build the subagents, evals, and patterns your team reuses, and contribute them back to the shared libraries.
Technical environment
Claude Code is our current primary agentic engineering environment: agents may plan and execute within defined constraints and governed environments, while engineers stay accountable for problem framing, architecture, acceptance criteria, security, verification, and production outcomes. Agent-generated work is backed by automated tests, runtime checks, reviewable evidence, and risk-based human approval — we match deterministic automation, structured workflows, or agents to the nature and risk of the task rather than maximising autonomy for its own sake.
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Your domain: front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform — the specific stack depends on your teams' mission.
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Legacy: Java, MS SQL, heritage architecture — being decomposed.
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Modern: Python, TypeScript, Vue, Postgres, Azure, Kubernetes; cloud-native / service-oriented architecture; Terraform-managed infrastructure.
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Mechanisms: subagents, MCP tool integrations, multi-agent workflows, and shared prompt, agent, and eval libraries.
Success in your first year
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Your teams reliably deliver their part of the lane's roadmap, with measurably better cycle time, quality, and stability.
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Technical direction and standards for your domain are clear, owned, and upheld — the bar has gone up.
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Your engineers have grown, including movement into senior or staff roles.
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AI-native ways of working are normal in your team, with patterns and evals you contributed.
Qualifications
Required
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Bachelor's degree in a relevant technical field (e.g. Computer Science, Software Engineering, or Information Technology) or equivalent experience.
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Engineering manager with a track record of growing engineers — including into senior and staff roles — and owning team delivery.
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A strong technical foundation in a relevant domain (front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform) — you set team-level technical direction, not just run process.
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Current, personal practice of AI-native software delivery (Claude Code or equivalent) — you can show your work and lead by example.
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Strong on talent development; comfortable acting on tough calls.
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Comfortable in ambiguity and inside legacy codebases; a strong communicator.
Nice to have
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Led a team through a significant technical or operating-model change.
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Has built and shared subagents, evals, or CLAUDE.md conventions a team reused.
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Deep domain expertise relevant to one of the product lanes.
Additional Information
What's in it for you
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A strong focus on personal development — including, in the Netherlands, our “10 to Grow” programme: 10% of your time and budget for your own growth.
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A hybrid working environment built on freedom, trust, and responsibility.
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An open, informal, and supportive culture, with collaboration across national borders.
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Excellent employment conditions.
Want to apply?
Does this sound like your next step? Apply with your CV and a short motivation letter via the application form. Tell us, with an example, how you gave both people and technical direction to a team — and what it shipped as a result.
