Engineering Manager

ScorePlay is the AI-powered media infrastructure for sports, built to automate the content operations behind the world's biggest sports organizations. We work with 300+ leagues, competitions, teams and broadcasters – including Ligue 1 and Premier League clubs, NBA and NFL teams, the Tour de France, the Australian Open, and leading bodies like UEFA and FIBA – helping them turn every moment on and off the field into high-value, structured content. Our platform brings all their media into one place and makes it effortless to find, edit and share in seconds.

Founded in 2021, we’re a 50-person team based between New York and Paris, growing 2x year over year with 98% retention. We’ve raised $20M+ from top investors including Alexis Ohanian and Harry Stebbing’s 20VC and elite athletes like Kevin Durant, Raphaël Varane, Mario Götze, Nico Rosberg and Giannis Antetokounmpo.

If you’re passionate about sports and thrive in fast-paced environments - and you want to help shape how the next generation of fans experience sports, you’re in the right place. We’re on track to become the global leader in sports media, and this is definitely the best time to join our adventure.

⚙️ The role

ScorePlay is the platform major sports organizations use to manage, search and share their media, from the second it's captured to the moment it reaches everyone's screen. A photographer uploads thousands of shots after the final whistle. A live feed has to be logged and clipped into highlights while the game is still being played. The right assets have to reach 10,000+ athletes, partners and newsrooms worldwide, automatically. At 145M+ minutes of video ingested every month and 15+ petabytes stored, much of the architecture needed at that scale simply hasn't been built before.

We're hiring an Engineering Manager to lead one of our product engineering teams. You'll report to the Head of Engineering and sit on the engineering leadership team.

This is a technical role. You'll need a deep understanding of how our systems work to prioritize well and propose the right technical solutions. Shipping code isn't your main priority, though. Your main priorities are the quality of your team's technical decisions, the people you grow, and the problems you solve before they become incidents. Understanding how everything works is a must. Shipping code is extra.

🔥 Why this is interesting

This is a rare chance to work where engineering meets sports. You'll help build a unique, state-of-the-art product whose engineering challenges come from data volume and latency. Content has to be ingested, processed, searched and distributed at petabyte scale, often while the match is still being played. When the whistle blows, the platform has to be fast, and it has to hold.

🧠 What you'll own

People

• Manage and grow your team: regular one-on-ones, clear expectations, direct feedback, growth plans that mean something.

• Handle performance head-on. Recognize what's great, address what isn't early and in writing, and see it through when it doesn't improve.

• Hire with our talent acquisition team: define the profiles your team needs, run interviews, and onboard new engineers so they ship in their first weeks.

Technical direction

• Own the quality of your team's technical decisions: review and challenge designs, requests for comments (RFCs) and estimates.

• Drive foundational work from problem framing to production, and balance it against client commitments.

• Own your team's reliability: incidents, debug complex issues, postmortems, on-call health, and technical debt that gets paid down, not just listed.

Delivery and product

• Run your team's delivery rhythm with your product manager, from scoping to production.

• Push back when a product decision doesn't hold up technically, and propose what would.

• Work with clients' technical teams on integrations and enterprise workflows when it matters.

• Be ready to get your hands dirty and go the extra mile. Sometimes it's all hands on deck, and that means you chip in too (and ship in).

Beyond your team

• Prioritize topics that go beyond engineering, and work with stakeholders from other teams (product, sales, customer success, support) to move them forward.

• Contribute to engineering leadership: how we plan, how we run incidents, how we make decisions.

🛠 The stack and how we work

Golang for services. PostgreSQL, Kafka, Temporal for workflows, OpenSearch, Kubernetes, all on AWS. We use AI heavily (but wisely), in the product and in how we work as engineers.

Cross-functional feature teams own their scope from conception to production. Structural decisions go through RFCs. Every week, the whole engineering team gets together to present and debate technical subjects. Every incident gets a postmortem, with real numbers attached.

🧩 What we're looking for

• 3+ years managing engineers as an Engineering Manager, after a solid run as a backend or platform engineer. You've managed underperformance to resolution, not only coached strong performers.

• A real technical foundation in backend and distributed systems. You don't need to write Go every day, but you can read an RFC on a search index or a Kafka topology and spot what's wrong.

• You've led a team through a significant architectural change while still delivering for customers.

• Initiative beyond your scope: examples of problems you owned across teams without being asked.

• Clear written communication. At ScorePlay, decisions are made in writing.

• Bonus: experience in a scale-up with 10–50 engineers, or on video, media or storage-heavy products.

📍 The setup

Remote from Europe, remote-first with regular team gatherings, in an international team spread across Europe and the US.

On-call is part of the role. When our platform is down, matches are happening without us. As an Engineering Manager, you're on the escalation path: when an incident needs coordination, decisions or someone to pull in the right people, that's you. Every incident gets a written postmortem with cost and impact attached, so the same thing doesn't wake anyone up twice.

🏆 Why ScorePlay

• Real scale, real stakes: 145M+ minutes of video a month, and the systems your team builds now become the foundations for years.

• The product is technical to its core, and it's what clients pay for. Engineering leaders are in the room for business decisions.

• No layers, no committees. A short line from you to the Head of Engineering and the founders.

• Your team's work shows up on match day, used by clubs, leagues and athletes you might already follow.

• An international team of 15+ nationalities across Europe and the US.

We know many people hesitate to apply if they don’t meet every single requirement on a job description. If you’re interested in ScorePlay but not sure you tick all the boxes, we’d still love to hear from you, this could be the start of a great long-term collaboration.