Engineering Manager - Product & Cloud Ops
At Playground Tech, we're at a vital tipping point. Our product is proven, our customer base is surging, and our engineering team is about to go from 5 to 30 people over the next 12 months.
Until now, our CTO has led the team alongside everything else. It worked when we were tiny, but to hit our next phase, we need dedicated leadership. We need someone whose entire mission is to scale the team without breaking the high-performing and humble culture that got us here.
To be clear: nothing is on fire. This isn’t a turnaround job or a rescue mission. It’s about taking a healthy, hungry team and ensuring it survives rapid growth. You’ll be maintaining velocity, ownership, and quality while tripling the headcount.
The timing is unique: you’re early enough to know everyone by name and shape the engineering culture.
What you'll do
Your job is to own the growth of the team and make the transition from "startup crew" to "engineering organization" feel intentional, rather than chaotic.
Build the Squad: Your most urgent task is partnering with Talent Acquisition to find, sell, and onboard world-class engineers at a pace that doesn't disrupt our flow.
Support Autonomy: Our engineers own their problems. You step in when they’re stuck, not before.
"Just Enough" Structure: You’ll introduce lightweight processes—retros, on-call rotations, incident reviews—as we grow. The goal is "just enough" structure to keep us moving, not a corporate rulebook.
Develop Talent: Our team ranges from fresh grads to 10+ year veterans. You’ll need a versatile coaching style to keep the juniors growing and the seniors challenged.
The Leadership Triangle: You’ll work in a tight loop with Martin (PM) and Sebbe (CTO). This isn't a non-technical manager bossing around engineers; it’s three technical minds driving the business with short feedback loops and zero hierarchy.
Team Health: In a fast-growing team, small cracks can become canyons quickly. You’ll catch risks like burnout or misalignment early and act before it escalates.
Who are you?
You’ve lived through the chaos of scaling a small tech team. You know exactly what breaks at fifteen engineers, and you know how to fix it without over-complicating things.
A Context-Setter: You lead by removing obstacles, not by micromanaging. The best sign of your success? Strong engineers choose to stay in your teams when things get difficult.
Low Ego, High Impact: You bring patterns and experience, but you don't show up with a "this is how we did it at [Big Tech Co]" attitude. You adapt to the team, not the other way around.
The Technical Bar: You don't have write production code, but your technical background allows you to support team members through the quality of your questions and your architectural judgment. You are comfortable discussing Kubernetes, Pulumi, ArgoCD, and Multicloud (AWS, Azure, GCP).
Skills & Background:
A hands-on technical background as an engineer (CloudOps, IaaS, SRE, or Developer).
Proven experience as a manager during a significant scaling journey.
A background in infrastructure or platform engineering is a plus, but leadership quality from a strong SaaS/Product environment wins every time.
Fluency in Swedish is a very-nice-to-have and English is a must.
Why Playground?
We are in an intense growth phase, but we refuse to become a corporate bureaucracy. We hire experts and get out of their way. We minimise the work around the work — no death-by-meeting culture, no process for the sake of process. The stack is modern: ArgoCD, Trivy, Falco, Golang, and the major clouds. You report directly to the PMO + CTO and will have real ownership and autonomy to shape how this function operates.
If you have spent the last few years wondering what it would feel like to build something from the ground up in a company that actually means it when they say they value speed, simplicity, and people — let’s talk.
Let's Play!
Applying to us is a breeze!
Upload your resumé or use your Linkedin profile.
Answer the choice-questions (no "please-rewrite-your-resume" nonsense, promise).
Feel free to include links to your portfolio, GitHub or similar if you have stuff you're proud of that you want to share with us.
Note:
Playground Group does not provide visa sponsorship or relocation support.
Applicants must already have a permanent and independent right to work in Sweden.
Welcome to Playground!
At Playground, you work on real, complex assignments for well-established and ambitious clients, not bench projects or short-lived experiments. Our teams are trusted with production systems, platforms, and data that actually matter. Here growth comes from ownership, curiosity, and doing the work properly. You’re trusted to think, contribute, and keep getting better, one meaningful step at a time.
Playground brings together specialized domains under one umbrella, with a shared culture and way of working, and easy access to broad technical expertise when it helps move the work forward.
Buzz: Manager, Cloud, Platform, Development Manager, Tech Lead, CTO, CloudOps, Sverige
- Department
- Playground Tech
- Role
- Engineering Manager
- Locations
- Stockholm
- Remote status
- Hybrid
Stockholm
About Playground Group
At Playground Group, we start, own, and grow companies — and the people who lead them. We’re a corporate group with a sharp focus on technology and leadership, built around specialized companies that together form a uniquely strong offering.