About the role
Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Founded in 2011, Depop has over 56 million registered users. Powered by a team of over 500 people, the company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy and continues to operate as a standalone company.
Depop is looking for a UK-based Engineering Manager to lead the Trust Detection team. Trust Detection's team goal is to catch bad content and behaviour before the Depop community gets hurt by it — fake listings, phishing messages, counterfeits, and the people behind them. The team consists of ML Scientists and Backend Engineers who build, train and maintain their own models, bring in third-party tools where they're the better fit, and build the platform that runs it all in production and acts on what it detects. They prioritise automation so moderators can focus on the hard calls; every decision a model or a human makes becomes training data for the next one. Their signals are used across Depop, in listings, search, chat and account security. The goal is to catch bad actors at the account level rather than one listing at a time, step in in real time, and offer 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.
Requirements
•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: comfortable with healthy disagreement and making decisions together
•The confidence to challenge engineers, ML, product partners and stakeholders constructively
•Motivation to protect people and help build trusted online communities
Great Engineering Managers don't always match every line of a job description. Adjacent experience and curiosity are just as valuable, including:
•ML in production: MLOps, model serving, real-time inference, feature pipelines, retraining or monitoring for drift
•Detection and risk: trust and safety, fraud, abuse, spam, content moderation or marketplace integrity
•Platform thinking: building shared services or APIs that other teams depend on
•Measurement: experimentation, shadow testing, golden-set evaluation or other ways of proving a model's real-world impact
•Cross-functional delivery: working with Operations, Policy, Legal, Compliance or Security partners
Responsibilities
•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
•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 the team builds 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
•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 success is measured: harm prevented, model precision and recall, and how often decisions are overturned
Team and scope
You'll lead a young, high-impact team at an exciting point. Trust Detection is a growing team with a lot still to build, with plenty of room to make a big impact and grow with it. You'll work where ML, engineering and real user impact meet, with support from your trio partners, the wider Trust & Support group and engineering leadership.
Benefits
Health + Mental Wellbeing
•PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
•Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
•Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
•Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
•Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting
Work/Life Balance
•25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
•Impact hours: up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
•Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service
Flexible Working
•MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options (role-dependent)
•All offices are dog-friendly
Family Life
•20 weeks of paid parental leave for birth parents (full-time regular employees)
•12 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birth parents (full-time regular employees)
•IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave
Learn + Grow
•Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews
•Learning budget
•Company-wide training workshops, materials and resources
Your Future
•Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
•Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva
Depop Extras
•In-office Depop Shop (free) and a packing station with free delivery
•Special milestones celebrated with gifts and rewards
