• Location: Remote, must be located in the EU
• Duration: Long-term position we’d like to convert to a full-time role in early 2027
• 20–28 hours per week, spread across 4–5 days
• Compensation: 500–600€/day (62.5–75€/hour) depending on profile
  • Note: the higher the rate, the fewer the weekly hours, from 28h at 500€/day down to 20h at 600€/day

Please email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]?subject=Engineering%20Manager) with your résumé and earliest start date.

About Mainmatter

Mainmatter is an engineering consultancy that helps clients solve their toughest tech challenges. We share our skills and expertise as teammates and help clients adopt new technologies like Rust or Vite, remove development bottlenecks, and modernize legacy systems and practices. Our projects range from helping small startups bring a prototype to production, to supporting established corporations in modernizing their tech stack and skills.

Our team of 20 engineers works remotely from 12 countries, mostly in Europe. We focus on Rust, Ember, and Svelte, and we're deeply involved in the communities around them: we maintain major open source projects, sit on the core teams of Ember and Svelte, and organize conferences such as EuroRust. We support our engineers in attending and speaking at conferences, contributing to open source, and writing about their work. We all meet in person twice a year to discuss company-wide topics and have fun together.

We believe a team with a broader range of backgrounds makes better decisions and better products. We're actively working to grow ours in that direction and especially welcome applications from people underrepresented in tech.

Who we are looking for

We're looking for a freelance Engineering Manager to share engineering management responsibilities across our team. You'll own the day-to-day for 8 engineers across a few projects, and work with the Director of Engineering on hiring, people growth, and project execution.

While this isn't a hands-on coding role, it requires real engagement with the technical work your team does: expect to be deep in conversations with engineers and clients about engineering challenges and solutions. We value an approachable style and leading with empathy for everyone on the team.

This is engineering management in a consultancy, which differs from a product company in ways that matter daily: your team's time is billable, staffing decisions are revenue decisions, and project scopes are commitments to clients. We’re looking for someone who has managed engineers in a similar environment.

Responsibilities

• Support your engineers through regular check-ins to help them prioritize their tasks, unblock them, and maximize their impact across the team
• Own career growth for your reports: skills matrix conversations, compensation reviews, performance management, onboarding and offboarding
• Keep your client projects healthy: attend project rituals, prepare and extend project scopes, deliver on budget and on time, flag risks early, and keep engineers and clients aligned
• Staff engineers onto projects based on technical fit, leadership skills, and team composition, balancing engineer growth with what clients need
• Support the engineering hiring pipeline: screening, interviewing, and hiring candidates in sync with the sales pipeline
• Manage the financials of your projects: ensure billable time is accurate ahead of invoicing, keep forecasts up to date, and keep the team appropriately staffed, without gaps or overcommitments