Technology, Product & Data

Our team of 400+ colleagues across Technology, Product and Data is at the heart of The Economist Group’s digital-first agenda. Together, we design, build and optimise the digital products, platforms and data capabilities that power our business and reach millions of people around the world. Whether you're an engineer, product manager, designer, data scientist or analyst, you'll work on products that have real-world impact. From enhancing economist.com and developing new products for Economist Intelligence to creating personalised experiences and applying AI to solve complex challenges, you'll help shape how consumers, businesses and government leaders access trusted insights. Working in cross-functional teams, we combine engineering excellence, product thinking and data expertise to solve meaningful problems, experiment with new technologies and continuously improve the experiences we create. It's an opportunity to do challenging, purposeful work alongside curious, collaborative colleagues, while helping drive sustainable growth for one of the world's most trusted brands.

The role

We are looking for an Engineering Manager – Web to lead a team of web engineers and help shape the future of economist.com. This is a player-coach role: you’ll own the health, delivery and growth of your engineering team, staying close to the code while leading people and partnering with product to shape what we build and why.

Reporting to the Head of Product & Engineering – Web, you will work within a cross-functional team alongside Product, Design and QA. You’ll help deliver a fast, reliable and accessible experience for anonymous, registered and subscribing users, with particular attention to mobile web. Your team’s work will contribute to discovery and acquisition, registration and subscription conversion, and the reading, navigation, personalisation, audio and account experiences that support engagement and retention.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of web engineers, providing day-to-day management, clear expectations, regular feedback, mentorship and career development.
• Stay hands-on: review code, contribute to architectural decisions, and step into implementation when it matters, working across React, Next.js, Node.js and TypeScript.
• Own delivery for your team: planning, sequencing work, managing dependencies and removing blockers in partnership with product management and the Head of Product & Engineering – Web.
• Partner with Product, Design, QA and platform and backend teams to turn roadmap priorities into a technically sound plan, with clear ownership from discovery through release, operation and measurement.
• Get hands-on with product and business requirements: ask questions, identify gaps and refine specifications before and during build. Make customer, commercial and technical trade-offs explicit.
• Use product and business metrics, including registration and subscription conversion, engagement and retention, alongside web performance and reliability measures to inform priorities and evaluate outcomes.
• Set and uphold engineering standards for code quality, automated testing, accessibility, security and release practices. Build quality into the team’s everyday work, aligned with wider architectural and QA standards.
• Improve mobile web performance and Core Web Vitals, making sound decisions about rendering, caching and content delivery across devices and network conditions.
• Own the operational health of the services your team builds, including observability, incident response and follow-up, technical debt and continuous improvement of reliability.
• Improve CI/CD, deployment safety, feature flagging and experimentation practices so the team can release frequently, learn from evidence and respond quickly to issues.
• Recruit, interview and onboard web engineers, raising the team’s technical capability and fostering an inclusive, collaborative environment.
• Represent your team in wider engineering discussions, contribute to web technical direction and resolve cross-team dependencies without adding unnecessary hand-offs.

Who you are

• Proven experience as an engineering manager or technical lead with direct people-management responsibility for web engineers.
• A strong hands-on background in modern web development, with working knowledge of React, Next.js, Node.js and TypeScript, and the ability to review code and assess architectural decisions.
• A track record of shipping and operating high-traffic, consumer-facing web products, balancing technical contribution with people leadership and delivery ownership.
• Strong mobile web engineering fundamentals, including Core Web Vitals, rendering strategies, CDN and caching behaviour, and device and network constraints.
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, observability, secure development and accessible web experiences, including WCAG standards.
• Strong product judgement: comfortable questioning and refining requirements, using customer and commercial evidence to make trade-offs, and measuring the impact of what your team delivers.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to work closely with product, design, QA and other engineering teams, and explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders.

It would be helpful to have

• Experience in consumer subscription, media or e-commerce, including identity, entitlements, paywalls, pricing or payment journeys.
• Experience with technical SEO, structured data or generative engine optimisation, and with feature flagging and A/B testing at scale.
• Experience contributing to design systems or introducing AI tools that improve engineering workflows and quality.

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