Engineering Manager

Protolabs Network is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead the Marketplace Operations engineering team in India. This role offers a unique opportunity to build and grow a high-performing team from scratch, drive the technical strategy for a critical global manufacturing marketplace, and lead the transformation of legacy systems into scalable, modern services. The ideal candidate will have strong Python expertise, a passion for engineering excellence, and the ability to translate complex business challenges into effective technology solutions.

Key Responsibilities:
- Build and lead the Marketplace Operations engineering team, including hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and developing engineers.
- Define the team’s technical direction, lead architecture and design decisions, and contribute hands-on when necessary.
- Ensure the reliability, scalability, and operational health of marketplace systems through incident management, observability, and continuous improvement.
- Lead the migration of marketplace capabilities from a legacy monolithic system to independent, scalable microservices.
- Own critical marketplace functions across the entire order lifecycle, such as order allocation, supplier management, production workflows, quality control, and shipment planning.
- Balance daily operational priorities with long-term engineering initiatives to ensure consistent delivery and ongoing improvement.
- Collaborate closely with Product, Operations, and global Engineering teams to define roadmaps, set priorities, and deliver business-critical solutions.
- Establish engineering standards, best practices, and effective workflows to strengthen the backend engineering ecosystem.

Required Qualifications:
- Over 10 years of experience building, developing, and managing web applications and backend services in production environments.
- At least 3 years of experience managing engineering teams, including hiring, mentoring, and developing technical talent.
- Proven track record of building engineering teams from the ground up or scaling existing teams significantly.
- Strong proficiency in Python with the ability to guide architecture, make technical decisions, and contribute hands-on.
- Experience with monolith decomposition, incremental service extraction, microservices architecture, and API/event contract design.
- Solid background in managing production systems, including on-call support, incident management, observability, and reliability engineering.
- Hands-on experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL.
- Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Excellent communication, collaboration, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work effectively across global teams.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits:
- Experience working with marketplace platforms or operational systems related to finance, payments, manufacturing, or quality control.
- Strong understanding of event-driven architectures and distributed systems.
- Familiarity with internal tooling platforms such as Retool.

What’s In It For You – India:
- Opportunity to build and lead the Marketplace Operations engineering team from the ground up and shape its future growth.
- Work on technology that powers a global manufacturing marketplace, directly impacting operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Take ownership of critical engineering decisions, architecture, system reliability, and the evolution of core marketplace capabilities.
- Lead the transformation of legacy systems into modern, scalable, independently managed services.
- Engage with a modern technology stack including Python, FastAPI, Flask, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, and event-driven architectures.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with global Product, Operations, and Engineering teams, influencing strategic decisions and business priorities.
- Shape engineering practices, build high-performing teams, and create a lasting impact on the organization’s engineering capabilities.

Protolabs Network may use AI tools to assist in parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications and analyzing resumes. These tools support but do not replace human judgment, with final hiring decisions made by people.