Engineering Manager | QA / SDET

Meet DeepL

DeepL is a global communications platform powered by Language AI. Since 2017, we’ve been on a mission to break down language barriers. Our human-sounding translations and intelligent writing suggestions are designed with enterprise security in mind. Today, they enable over 100,000 businesses to transform communications, reach new markets, and improve productivity. And, empower millions of individuals worldwide to make sense of the world and express their ideas.

Our goal is to become the global leader in Language AI, building products that drive better communication, foster connections, and make a real-life impact. To achieve this, we need talented individuals like you to join our exciting journey. If you're ready to work with a dynamic team and build your career in the fast-moving AI space, DeepL is your next destination.

What sets us apart

What sets us apart is our blend of modern technology, competitive benefits, and an open, welcoming work culture that enables our people to thrive. When we share what it's like to work at DeepL, the reactions are overwhelmingly positive. This may be because of our products that have helped countless people worldwide or our shared mission to improve communication for individuals and businesses, bringing cultures closer together. What we know for sure is this: being part of DeepL means joining a team dedicated to innovation and employee well-being. Discover what our teams have to say about life at DeepL on LinkedIn, Instagram and our Blog.

Meet the team behind this journey

At DeepL, you'll join the QA Developer Experience team, a crucial part of the broader Developer Experience track. This team is at the heart of our engineering ecosystem, driving the overall testing strategy and ensuring a high-quality experience across our algorithms, infrastructure, and applications. As part of the developer experience family, you'll collaborate with teams across product, research and platform engineering, leveraging a wealth of knowledge and best practices.

We cultivate a strong quality-first culture, where every team member is empowered to advocate for customer experience improvements. Our agile teams promote close collaboration, and as a QA Engineering Manager, you will be instrumental in fostering this collaborative environment. You'll not only lead your team in shaping our test automation frameworks and tooling but also play a key role in building a strong community within the QA craft. This role offers unique opportunities to drive quality across the full technology stack, working collaboratively with various stakeholders to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Your responsibilities

The core purpose of the Engineering Manager role is to develop an engineering team to an autonomous, high performing stage:

• Delivery & Excellence: Collaborate with stakeholders, representing the team's quality perspective on new or existing services and products, focusing on testability and automation potential. Align roadmaps with priorities, ensure new features enable timely delivery with integrated testing, and establish high-level engineering excellence metrics for automated quality. Provide strong technical oversight by resolving complex automation challenges, participating in test framework design, and driving robust test automation strategies. Drive continuous improvement of DeepL, practices, and technology, emphasizing increased test automation coverage and efficiency for high-pace, high-quality delivery.
• People Leadership: Inspire, develop, recruit, and motivate a cross-functional quality engineering & automation team. Conduct regular 1:1s with team members, set individual development or improvement plans, and foster a healthy, non-retaliatory feedback culture within the team.
• Team Management: As a collaborative partner with other engineering leads, jointly oversee the team’s strategy, quarterly goals, and business-technical metrics. Ensure the team's development process methodology is optimal, actively participate in building and maintaining the technical roadmap, and take ownership of technical incident management. Dedicate time and resources to quality efforts, maintain a current knowledge base and documentation for the team's services and artifacts, and coordinate resource planning in collaboration with the DevEx track lead and track Leads as needed.
• Manage growth: You derive satisfaction from navigating change and collaboratively discovering innovative solutions with your team and various stakeholders within a dynamic and evolving environment.
• Strategic Leadership: Responsibility includes guiding the strategic direction of the team's engagements and collaborating with stakeholders on the overall DeepL testing strategy. Not directly hands-on in delivering, the role necessitates an understanding and ability to translate business needs into clear, actionable testing requirements for engineers. A profound understanding of technical architecture, potential challenges, and aligning the team's work with broader organizational goals.

A day in the life

As an Engineering Manager for the QA Developer Experience team, shaping the overall testing strategy and driving a significant shift towards automation. Your mornings will involve collaborating with product and engineering leaders to define comprehensive testing strategies and roadmaps, ensuring alignment with organizational goals for quality and speed. You'll oversee the ownership, development, and evolution of our core testing frameworks and tooling, identifying opportunities to enhance developer experience and maximize automation.

Throughout the day, you'll engage with your team and product engineers to review technical designs, provide guidance on complex automation challenges, and champion best practices for testing. A key focus will be identifying areas where manual testing can be reduced or eliminated, leveraging innovative solutions and fostering a culture of automated quality. You will be instrumental in enabling engineering teams to deliver high-quality products faster through robust and efficient testing solutions.

Qualities we look for

• High level of hands-on technical experience in software development and architecture
• Proven track record of leading and scaling QA or software development teams in a business-facing role
• Extensive industry experience as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) or Software Development Engineer (SDE)
• Strong programming skills with modern programming languages (we use C#, C++, Python, Typescript and Go) with proven expertise in architecting and implementing enterprise-level test automation frameworks
• Strong understanding of software development principles, design patterns, and architectural concepts
• Ability to balance developer experience with product needs
• Ability to adapt easily to new environments and technologies in a scaling and rapidly changing environment
• Excellent communication skills in English with a strong sense of empathy and a solutions-oriented mindset

Preferred Qualities

• Advanced experience in building and maintaining automated testing infrastructure
• Strong expertise in developing custom test frameworks and testing tools from scratch
• Strong understanding of cloud architecture patterns and testing strategies
• Proven track record of improving test coverage and testing efficiency through automation
• Experience in architecting next-generation test infrastructure that combines traditional CI/CD pipelines with AI-driven decision-making for optimized test selection, parallel execution, and automated result analysis
• Experience with innovative quality practices that leverage AI for automated analysis and predictive system reliability testing
• Experience with self-healing test systems that use machine learning to adapt to application changes, automatically maintain test suites, and provide AI-driven insights into test coverage

We are an equal opportunity employer

You are welcome at DeepL for who you are—we appreciate authenticity here. Our product is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all succeed, contribute, and think forward! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our diversity that we will find the power to break down language barriers in the world.