Engineering Manager

Be yourself at Protolabs
Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification.  We are an equal opportunity employer, and we are committed to building a diverse team that feels they are valued in the workplace.  So do you feel you do not meet every single requirement but still intrigued? We encourage you to still apply!  You can help make our company even better.  We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, age, mental or physical ability, or any way you represent yourself.  We strongly believe diversity makes for more successful teams.

Why Protolabs?
We are the leaders in digital manufacturing. We hire doers, makers, and creative thinkers who tackle our roles with an entrepreneurial spirit. Our culture is centered around meaningful work that brings new and innovative products to market at unprecedented speeds. We are a diverse team that comes from all walks of life and take pride in our team who is smart, genuine, humble, and passionate about what we do. It’s our people who fuel our creativity and make our culture feel like home.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to join our team!

This is a hybrid role, and we are accepting applications from candidates based in the Netherlands.

The Software Engineering Manager – Web Applications leads and develops a cross‑functional team of software engineers, quality engineers, and technical product managers responsible for delivering and enhancing the company’s customer‑facing quoting platform. This role combines people leadership and technical oversight to ensure high‑quality, scalable web applications that support customer needs and business growth.

What you’ll do :
• Lead and manage a high‑performing team of full‑stack engineers, driving the development and iteration of customer‑facing web application and API products

• Support the team with ensuring solutions are scalable and aligned with business needs

• Coordinate cross-functional collaboration across teams in Minneapolis and Amsterdam, establishing strong communication patterns and improving alignment on goals and priorities

• Articulate clear trade-offs among maintenance costs, user impact, and opportunity cost, ensuring every decision prioritizes long-term product health and maximizes team efficiency

• Act as a technical thought leader and strategic partner, interfacing with Product, Sales, and Fulfilment to translate technical possibilities into measurable customer value

• Ensuring clear, timely communication across all levels of stakeholders

• Drive continuous product and platform improvement through structured experimentation, performance evaluation and feedback loops with internal and external users

• Foster a strong engineering team, lead hiring efforts, onboarding and ongoing coaching, while promoting a collaborative, research-driven and delivery-focused team culture

• Collaborate with peer engineering managers to establish engineering standards, tooling, shared UI components and platform infrastructure (CI/CD, observability) for faster, safer experimentation and deployment

What you’ll bring :
• 3+ years of experience leading cross-functional teams in high-growth, technical environments

• Proven leadership within product‑centric companies with a track record of delivering customer‑facing web or mobile applications

• Skilled at cultivating autonomous, high-performance teams by setting a clear technical vision, guiding execution, and serving as a strategic bridge between engineering, product, and data science

• Deep understanding of scalable web architecture (e.g., microservices, event-driven patterns), modern frontend frameworks (e.g., Angular/React/Vue), APIs and cloud-native platforms (e.g., AWS/Azure), with comfort navigating the complexity of evolving platforms

• Experience partnering with UX/product research and directly incorporating customer feedback into planning and prioritization

• Experience with modern DevOps and quality practices (CI/CD, testing, security, accessibility, observability, SLOs/incident management)

• People leadership: proven ability to hire, coach, retain, and develop engineers, strong skills in performance management, career pathing, and building inclusive team culture

• Communication & stakeholder management: exceptional written and verbal communication, comfortable presenting trade-offs, roadmaps and status to stakeholders across the business

• Customer focus: experience building customer-facing products, understanding customer journeys, and prioritizing work based on customer impact and business value

• Technical judgment: ability to evaluate architectures, trade-offs, and technical debt, guide the team on maintainability, scalability, security and observability decisions without being the primary IC

• Cross-functional collaboration: experience working with product managers, designers, data, and operations to deliver end-to-end solutions

What's in it for you?:
• Part of our incredible journey is clearly down to our amazing team, and we strongly believe in giving people a space to truly, authentically be themselves. We also believe that treating our employees well and sprinkling a great place to work with some nice perks can make work a little sweeter.

• Annual company bonus. We celebrate success together! Employees are not only rewarded for their achievements but also for contributing to the overall success of the business.

• Wellness and well-being with access to OpenUp psychologists, practice mindfulness with Headspace and tons more.

• Doggo-friendly office. We are big pet lovers and fully encourage hanging out with your (and your colleagues’) furry friends in the office

• Daily Lunch and snacks are provided in the office; it's a moment for our teams to connect and recharge. Shared meals strengthen our bonds and fuel collaboration.

• We offer learning and development days to be used for training or on volunteering, money to spend on learning courses, events, trainings, Access to our in-house LEARN platform with diverse courses, training, and workshops, In-house 3D Printing and much more!

• Follow us on Instagram to see what Life at Protolabs is all about!