At Phorest, we create products our clients love and build and run exceptional systems that Phorest and its customers can rely on, helping salons, spas and aesthetic clinics run successful businesses and grow with confidence. Our software brings together the tools they need to run their day, support their teams and build lasting client relationships.
Our ambition is to become the number one platform for premium hair, beauty and aesthetics businesses globally. For our Product & Engineering teams, that means understanding the people behind those businesses and building thoughtful, reliable products that make a real difference to how they work. You'll join colleagues across Product, Design, Engineering and Data, bringing your expertise to challenges that matter to the businesses we serve.
We're looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to build and lead a brand-new engineering team from the ground up. You'll shape the team, its ways of working and its technical foundations from day one.
The team will focus on the internal systems that help us look after our customers and run our business: the tools our Customer Success teams use to support, retain and grow salons, and the billing systems that underpin our revenue. It's a rare chance to work on systems with direct, measurable impact on the business, and to modernise critical, long-standing platforms in a careful, incremental way.
You'll partner closely with a Product Manager, supported by experienced Principal and Staff Engineers. You'll also help set the technical direction: where data should live, which systems own what, when to buy versus build, and how we simplify our wider tooling landscape over time.
This is a role for someone who wants to stay close to the code and the architecture while building a team that delivers reliably and enjoys doing it.
- Build the team from the ground up. Partner with our People team to hire and onboard engineers, creating an inclusive environment where people feel supported and can do their best work. Coach engineers through regular one-to-ones, clear feedback and meaningful development conversations.
- Stay hands-on. Pair with engineers, unblock the team and contribute to technical design and implementation. Expect to spend around 40–50% of your time on hands-on technical work, flexing with the team's needs.
- Shape technical direction. Work with Senior, Staff and Principal Engineers to agree architectural principles and guardrails, so that short-term solutions move us toward a coherent long-term direction.
- Turn business needs into a clear plan. Co-own the roadmap with your Product Manager, involve the team in decisions and translate priorities into practical technical execution. Deliver in small, valuable slices.
- Own delivery across more than one area of focus. Make priorities, dependencies and trade-offs explicit, communicate progress openly and raise risks early.
- Reduce risk in business-critical systems. Improve the security, reliability and maintainability of the systems the team owns, and help move important workflows onto safer, modern platforms without disrupting live operations.
- Partner across the business. Build strong relationships with Customer Success, Finance, Business Systems and Data colleagues, keeping the team focused on outcomes that make their work easier and lead to better results for salons.
- Measure what matters. Define success in business outcomes such as time saved, churn reduced, revenue expanded and cost removed, rather than the amount of software shipped.
- Keep improving how we work. Create clear, sustainable delivery practices, and explore practical ways to use AI to increase the team's leverage and throughput.
