Engineering Manager (Elixir, AI Team)

3 billion people across the world work in frontline jobs. Yet, despite rising costs and staff shortages, frontline organisations are still left to choose between paper, Excel, and WhatsApp, or decade-old workforce management solutions to take care of the most important part of their businesses - their people.

Enter Sona: the next generation of AI-native, frontline workforce management. We’ve built an end-to-end platform covering Scheduling, HR, Payroll, and Communications that gives the largest frontline organisations everything they need to staff more intelligently and empower their teams.

In under 4 years, we’ve already made a deep impact on the lives of over 100k frontline workers and the operation of their organisations, grown the team to 110+, and secured over $50M in funding from notable VC’s, including Felicis, Northzone, Gradient Ventures (Google), SpeedInvest, Antler, and Notion Capital, plus notable angels like Tom Blomfield (Monzo).

It’s a hugely exciting time to be joining the team as we’re still small enough that you’ll have a significant impact on the company’s growth trajectory and culture, yet large enough to have a great structure, experienced leaders and world-class benefits in place. More on working at Sona here.

About the Role

As our newest Engineering Manager, you’ll lead our AI team who working on the products that use AI (both LLMs and ML forecasting) to truly differentiate Sona from the legacy competitors in our space.

We fundamentally believe that the best products are built when small, cross functional, autonomous teams are empowered to solve business problems as they see fit. Engineering managers at Sona stay hands-on while also focusing on growing and developing a high performing team and championing the highest standards of product engineering.

Everything starts with our customers and our engineers (and wider Product team) work closely with our Customer team and users themselves to ensure we’re building a product that fits our users needs. Our Product team principles give more of a flavour of how we like to work day-to-day.

Our stack is built primarily around Elixir, with a Phoenix LiveView web frontend (PETAL stack) and a GraphQL API for communicating with our React Native mobile app.

We're also huge fans of agentic coding and believe in its ability to dramatically increase our leverage. We especially love tools like Aider and believe they can add huge value across engineering, product and design. If you've got experience working with similar tools, we'd love to hear about it!

Responsibilities

Day to day, you will be: 

• Leading and growing a high performing engineering team
• Championing high technical standards across our team
• Driving continuous improvements to your team’s delivery process  
• Building deep understanding of our product and user needs
• Collaborating with our Product Managers to prioritise roadmaps and understand the ‘why’ behind feature requests
• Work towards owning P&L for your team

Requirements

Everybody’s different, but a lot of the following probably applies to you:

• You have some professional experience building software in Elixir and at least a strong interest in what can be achieved by utilising AI in products
• You’ve led teams before and have strong opinions on how to empower them to build the best possible products
• You have a strong preference towards taking ownership, and focus on “getting it shipped” for user feedback over a “complex and shiny” solution
• You're a believer in AI coding tools and have examples of how they've helped you improve your own work over the last year or so
• You’re in a country which is GMT +/- 3 and fluent communicating both verbally and in writing in English
• You’re able to attend in-person company meetups 2-3 times per year, these will be around 4 days long and usually require flying both in and outside of Europe

Benefits

• Salary: £100k-120k (or local currency equivalent)
• Full remote and flexible working
• Share options
• 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days) 
• Extra day of leave for every year of service
• Pension contributions matched up to 5%
• Comprehensive health insurance
• Enhanced parental leave & pay
• Co-working space stipend for those based outside London
• Bi-annual all expenses paid team retreats
• The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office
• Professional development budget
• Unlimited free books

Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.