About the role
Depop is looking for a UK-based Engineering Manager to lead our Account Protection squad.
The team’s mission is simple: make strong account protection the default for every Depop user, so genuine buyers and sellers can use Depop with confidence.
You’ll help shape and grow this space, building the people, systems, and practices that protect users from account takeovers, automated abuse, scraping, and other threats while keeping Depop simple, trusted, and easy to use.
You’ll lead a squad of around 5 to 7 engineers, developing the engineers already in the team and helping hire and onboard new team members as the area grows. You’ll work closely with a dedicated Product Manager, Product Designer, and senior technical partners across Depop.
This is a single-squad leadership role with meaningful ownership, clear support from senior leadership, and the opportunity to shape an important product-security area at Depop.
What you’ll do
- Lead, support, and develop a squad of engineers.
- Help establish Account Protection as a clear and effective capability at Depop.
- Own the team’s delivery, health, and product outcomes.
- Create clarity around priorities, sequencing, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs.
- Stay close to technical direction, architectural decisions, and engineering trade-offs without needing to own every technical decision.
- Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, Security, Marketplace, Trust & Support, and operational teams.
- Make risks, dependencies, and decisions visible early, so the right support and alignment are in place.
- Build an inclusive team culture where people can contribute, learn, challenge ideas respectfully, work through disagreement constructively, and grow.
What we’re looking for
We’re looking for an approachable, thoughtful engineering leader who cares about people, product impact, and technical quality.
You’ll be a strong fit if you bring:
- Experience managing, coaching, or developing engineers.
- A strong software engineering background and comfort engaging with technology, architecture, and technical trade-offs.
- Strong ownership of team health, delivery, and product outcomes.
- The ability to create clarity and momentum in ambiguous or evolving problem spaces.
- A collaborative leadership style, with empathy, clear communication, and the ability to work through disagreement constructively.
- Motivation to protect users and help make online communities safer.
Helpful experience, not required
Any experience in the areas below would be useful, but we do not expect one person to bring all of it. Adjacent experience, sound judgement, and curiosity for the account protection space are also valuable.
- Authentication and account access: login flows, session management, OAuth/OIDC, MFA, WebAuthn/passkeys, device trust, or account recovery.
- Account protection: account takeover prevention, suspicious login detection, credential stuffing prevention, risk‑based authentication, or similar user‑protection challenges.
- Bot and scraping mitigation: bot detection, bot mitigation, scraping prevention, abuse prevention, rate limiting, or protecting user‑facing systems from automated traffic.
- Edge‑layer protection: Cloudflare Bot Management, WAF, Turnstile, rate limiting, or similar CDN, edge, or traffic‑protection tooling.
- Reliable production systems: observability, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, experimentation, incident learning, or operating systems where reliability matters.
Where on‑call support is required, this is part of a staffed and compensated rota.
What’s in it for you
This is an opportunity to shape a meaningful and growing area at Depop, with real ownership and support from senior leadership.
You’ll help build systems that protect people’s accounts, support genuine buyers and sellers, and strengthen trust in the Depop community. You’ll also have the opportunity to grow the team over time through coaching, clearer team practices, and hiring as the area develops.
Benefits
Depop offers flexible working, inclusive parental leave, mental health support, learning budgets, volunteering time, and benefits designed to support people inside and outside work.
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 with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid‑working model with Flex, Office‑Based, and Remote options *role‑dependent. All offices are dog‑friendly.
Family Life: For birth parents: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full‑time regular employees. For non‑birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for 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; upskilling our employees with company‑wide training workshops, materials and resources.
Your Future: Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3× your salary); pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva.
Depop Extras: In‑office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery. Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!
Depop is an equal opportunity employer
We encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and welcome requests for reasonable adjustments throughout the interview process.
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