Engineering Manager - Trust Detection

Engineering Manager - Trust Detection

Depop

15 hours ago

Full-time

On-site

London, England, United Kingdom

Engineer

Company Description

Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.

Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it.

Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com

We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

We’re looking for a UK-based Engineering Manager to lead our Trust Detection team.

Trust Detection’s team goal is to catch the bad content and behaviour before the Depop community gets hurt by it. That means fake listings, phishing messages, counterfeits, and the people behind them.

We’re a team of ML Scientists and Backend Engineers. We build, train and maintain our own models, and bring in third-party tools where they’re the better fit. We also build the platform that runs it all in production and acts on what it detects. We prioritise automation as much as we can, so moderators can focus on the hard calls. Every decision a model or a human makes becomes training data for the next one.

Our signals are used across Depop, in listings, search, chat and account security. We want to catch bad actors at the account level rather than one listing at a time, step in in real time, and offer our risk scores as a service other teams can build on.

You'll manage the backend engineers on the team and form its leadership trio alongside the ML Manager and Product Manager. Together, you'll set direction, shape the roadmap and turn the team's mission into shipped, measurable impact.

What you’ll do

• Lead and grow the team

• Manage, coach and develop a team of Backend Engineers through 1:1s, feedback, career growth and performance.

• Build an inclusive, high-trust culture where ML and Backend Engineers work as one team, not two disciplines handing work over a wall.

• Shape the team's hiring, onboarding and ways of working as it grows.

• Be one third of the leadership trio

• Partner with the ML Manager and Product Manager to set the team's direction, priorities and roadmap.

• Own team delivery and health while the ML Manager leads on modelling approach and the PM on problem and outcome. Hold each other to a shared set of goals.

• Own the technical direction of the trust detection platform, working with staff engineers and partner teams to deliver it.

• Turn strategy into a clear plan: break down ambiguous problems, sequence the work, and keep momentum high.

• Drive delivery and engineering quality

• Help the team take models from experiment to reliable production systems, including real-time inference, monitoring and safe rollouts.

• Stay close to architecture and technical trade-offs, especially as we build shared risk-scoring services used by other teams.

• Lift engineering standards across both disciplines: testing, observability, cost, and operational excellence for systems that act on users.

• Make risks, dependencies and decisions visible early, so the right support and alignment are in place.

• Work across the business

• Collaborate and influence Trust & Safety Operations, Policy, Legal, Data and partner product teams who consume the team's signals.

• Help the team balance user safety, fairness to genuine sellers, compliance obligations and speed, and explain those trade-offs clearly.

• Champion how we measure success: harm prevented, model precision and recall, and how often decisions are overturned.

• What we’re looking for

• We’re looking for an engineering leader who combines technical depth, product judgement, and inclusive people leadership.

You’ll be a strong fit if you bring:

• Experience managing and developing engineers, ideally including senior engineers.
• A strong software engineering background, with the confidence to engage in architecture and technical trade-offs.
• Experience leading teams that run production systems, with a focus on reliability and quality.
• Experience working with, or a real appetite to learn how to lead, ML or data-heavy teams. You don't need to build models, but you should be curious about how they get from notebook to production.
• Clear ownership of team health and delivery, and the ability to create momentum in ambiguous, fast-changing problem spaces.
• A collaborative style in a shared-leadership model: you're comfortable with healthy disagreement and making decisions together.