Engineering Manager: API-First Data Platform Leader

Global marketplaces — Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Shopify and over a hundred others — are the engines of modern commerce. But the data sits locked inside each channel, fragmented and rarely adding up to a clear picture.

MerchantSpring is the API-first data infrastructure for the businesses that operate, advise on, and build for digital commerce. We consolidate cross-channel marketplace data into a single source of truth that our customers reach through a visualisation platform, an API gateway, MCP tools and embeddable widgets.

We are profitable, self-funded, and seven years in — scaling on our own revenue rather than someone else's runway. We are headquartered in Australia with a growing presence in Kuala Lumpur, and we operate as a single team across sites.

Today the platform spans 120+ e-commerce channels, manages roughly 12TB of data across 35,000 seller accounts in 29 countries, serving agencies, enterprise brands, and ecosystem and technology partners.

**The role

We are looking for a Engineering Manager to take full ownership of our engineering function and lead the next chapter: our evolution into a true API-first data platform. You will inherit a team of 11 engineers across our ETL, API and AI/MCP squads**, report to our CEO, and own the technical vision, the architecture, and the culture that carries us from startup to scale-up.

This is a builder's leadership role. We want someone who leads from within the architecture — setting direction, making the hard technical calls, and rolling up their sleeves to code when it helps the team move or unblocks a problem. As the team grows, the role is expected to evolve further toward organisational leadership, and we say so openly because we want someone who wants that trajectory.

**What You'll Own

• Technical vision and architecture. Translate business goals into a technical roadmap, set direction across the squads, and own the architectural bets — with our API-first data layer as the centrepiece
• Platform scale. Take our API and data platform from where they are today to scale: more channels, more volume, and more external builders relying on our endpoints, MCP tools and widgets
• Infrastructure economics. Own the unit economics of the platform. A large and growing share of our cost base sits in database and infrastructure spend, and you will be accountable for managing and driving it down as we scale with a focus on database cost:
• TimescaleDB compression, retention and continuous aggregates
• Postgres query and index optimisation and right-sizing
• MongoDB indexing and sharding

• Data integrity and reliability. 35,000 accounts depend on financially accurate data. Own incident practices and resilience that keep serious problems rare — and provide visible, decisive leadership on the rare occasions they aren't