Engineering Manager, Kafka

As Engineering Manager for the Kafka team, you lead a 5+ infrastructure engineers in delivering reliable, scalable managed services for asynchronous messaging. You partner with a Staff Engineer and a TPM to translate technical strategy into roadmaps and ensure transparent delivery across Vinted’s development groups. Your focus is team health, growth, and sustainable delivery while shaping golden paths for product developers. This role sits in the Persistence domain, driving cross-DC Kafka operations and platform reliability at scale. You’ll help build a high-performing, collaborative team that ships with quality and stability.

• share options programme
• private health insurance
• learning budget (annual)
• hybrid work model
• 2 office environments with perks ( Vilnius Kaunas )
• home office support budget

• Lead and develop a 5+ person infrastructure engineering team with goal-setting and performance reviews
• Mentor engineers and design career development plans to grow the team
• Monitor team health, delivery velocity, and workload to sustain a healthy pace
• Define and own efficient operational procedures, agile workflows, incident response, and on-call practices
• Unblock engineers, manage cross-team dependencies, and cooperate with peer platform teams
• Participate in management rituals, planning, post-incident reviews, and continuous improvement
• Oversee execution, capacity planning, and hiring as the team grows
• Collaborate with Staff Engineer and TPM to convert strategy into roadmaps and priorities
• Communicate SLAs, service expectations, and roadmap visibility to internal stakeholders
• Ensure eventually consistent data synchronization across cross-Atlantic markets without compromising performance
• Focus on personal and team growth, including performance and compensation reviews

• Experience managing and developing software or infrastructure engineering teams with a track record of delivering results
• Strong understanding of goal-setting, performance reviews, feedback, and career growth for engineers
• Ability to collaborate in a leadership triad with a Staff Engineer and a TPM
• Skilled at creating structured workflows, clarifying ownership, and managing stakeholder expectations
• Concern for people development, psychological safety, healthy on-call culture, and team satisfaction
• Proficiency in high-level software engineering and platform concepts with effective communication to technical stakeholders
• Excellent written and spoken English
• Advantage: experience in platform, infrastructure, SRE, or cloud organizations
• Advantage: experience with Apache Kafka or similar platforms
• Advantage: experience establishing on-call rotations, incident post-mortems, or service-level management

• people development
• psychological safety
• strong communication
• Apache Kafka
• infrastructure engineering
• SRE practices