Engineering Manager - Trusted Community

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.

AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.

If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to adjustments@depop.com.

About the role
Depop is looking for a UK-based Engineering Manager to lead our Trusted Community squad.

The team’s mission is to create a community of trusted users by keeping people safe and giving them a clear path to success.
For Depop users, trust means being able to trust what they see, transact with confidence, feel protected and fairly treated, and know that positive participation is recognised.

Trusted Community is a well-established cross-functional squad made up of backend and iOS engineers, working closely with a dedicated Product Manager and Product Designer. The team builds the user education, trust signals, controls, and interventions that help Depop feel safe, fair, and trusted.

The work includes areas such as user guidance, risk-based controls, age verification, gating, listing review, message interventions, account-level controls, and other compliance-sensitive experiences. This is a complex and fast-changing space, where the team needs to move quickly, learn fast, and make thoughtful trade-offs across user experience, technical quality, fairness, compliance, and legal obligations.

This role is well suited to an Engineering Manager with a strong software engineering background, strong product judgement, and the confidence to engage deeply with technical direction when needed. Direct experience in trust, safety, compliance, marketplace integrity, or similar spaces would be valuable, but we also highly value candidates who have led strong product engineering teams, especially experiment-led squads building user-facing systems.

What you’ll do

• Lead, support, and develop a cross-functional squad of backend and iOS engineers.
• Own the team’s delivery, health, and product outcomes.
• Help the team create clarity in a complex and evolving problem space.
• Drive progress at pace, with a strong focus on learning, iteration, and measurable impact.
• Stay close to technical direction, architecture, and engineering trade-offs.
• Dive into technical detail when needed, while enabling senior engineers to lead on implementation and technical design.
• Challenge assumptions constructively across Engineering, Product, Design, and stakeholder groups.
• Help the team make balanced decisions across user safety, fairness, usability, compliance, legal obligations, technical quality, and delivery.
• 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, and grow.

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, coaching, or developing engineers.
• A strong software engineering background, with confidence engaging in technology, architecture, and technical trade-offs.
• Strong ownership of team health, delivery, and product outcomes.
• The ability to create momentum by clarifying next steps, unblocking decisions, and helping teams make progress.
• Comfort working in ambiguous or fast-changing problem spaces.
• The confidence to challenge engineers, product partners, and stakeholders constructively.
• The judgement to balance speed of learning with responsible delivery in sensitive user-facing areas.
• A collaborative leadership style, with empathy, clear communication, and the ability to work through disagreement constructively.
• Motivation to protect users and help build trusted online communities.
• We know great Engineering Managers do not always match every line of a job description. We value different paths into engineering leadership and are interested in the strengths, judgement, and perspective you would bring to the team.
• ​A genuine curiosity about AI and a willingness to explore how it can enhance your day-to-day work

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 Trusted Community space are also valuable.

• Trust and safety product experiences: user education, trust signals, safety prompts, warnings, restrictions, appeals, or other features that help people participate safely and fairly.
• Risk-based controls and interventions: controls that adapt based on user behaviour, risk signals, account state, eligibility, verification level, policy requirements, or marketplace context.
• Age assurance and compliance-sensitive experiences: age verification, age estimation, youth safety, safeguarding, gating, or related user journeys.
• Experiment-led product engineering: leading teams that use data, experimentation, measurement, and iteration to improve user-facing outcomes.
• Complex user-facing systems: building systems where reliability, fairness, privacy, user experience, and operational impact all matter.
• Cross-functional delivery: working with Product, Design, Policy, Legal, Operations, Trust and Safety, Security, or Compliance partners.

What’s in it for you

This is an opportunity to lead an established team working on one of Depop’s most meaningful product areas.

You’ll help build experiences and platform capabilities that protect users, support genuine buyers and sellers, and strengthen trust in the Depop community. You’ll join a team with a strong existing context and have the opportunity to shape its next stage through people development, thoughtful delivery, clearer team practices, and high-quality execution.

You’ll also gain experience in a fast-moving trust and safety environment, where product, engineering, compliance, and user impact intersect. The work is challenging, but meaningful, with strong support from product, design, engineering, and senior leadership partners.

Depop offers flexible working, inclusive parental leave, mental health support, learning budgets, volunteering time, and benefits designed to support people inside and outside work.

Depop is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and welcome requests for reasonable adjustments throughout the interview process.

We particularly welcome applications from women and people from underrepresented gender identities in engineering leadership.
 

Additional Information

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 parent: 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 3x 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!