Engineering Manager ( R&D )

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 in Amsterdam.
This role is ideal for someone who started as a machine learning engineer and has grown into a leadership position. You’ll lead a team building ML-driven products, support their growth, and ensure technical excellence while aligning with business goals. Our tech stack: S3, PostgreSQL, Redshift, Snowflake, dbt, Python (PyTorch, Tensorflow, sklearn, polars, pandas), Rust, C++, kubernetes, Prefect, Github Actions, Weights & Biases and Datadog 

What you'll do

• Lead and manage a high-performing team of ML engineers, driving the development and iterations of our advanced pricing and geometry algorithms 
• Support the team with ensuring solutions are scalable and aligned with business needs 
• Coordinate cross-functional collaboration across teams in Minneapolis and Amsterdam, establishingstrong communication rhythms and improving alignment on goals and priorities 
• Demonstrated expertise in balancing team capacity with project scope to deliver sustainable functionality.  
• Skilled at articulating clear trade-offs among maintenance costs, user impact, and opportunity cost, ensuring every decision prioritises long-term product health and maximizes team efficiency 
• Act as a technical thought leader and strategic partner, interfacing with key stakeholders across Product, Sales and Fulfilment to translate complex ML capabilities into business value 
• Support lean machine learning development practices,such as experimentation, rapid prototyping and a writing-first, async-first culture
• Ensuring clear, timely communication across all levels of stakeholders 
• Drive continuous model and system improvement through structured experimentation, performance evaluation and feedback loops with internal and external users 
• Foster a strong ML 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 ML-specific engineering standards, tooling and shared infrastructure for faster, safer experimentation and deployment 

What it takes

• Over 5 years of experience leading cross-functional teams in high-growth, technical environments
• Proven leadership within product-centric companies with a strong track record of delivering impactful ML solutions
• 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
• Brings a deep understanding of scalable ML system architecture and is comfortable navigating the complexity of evolving platforms
• Experience with modern ML stacks and infrastructure is a strong advantage

What's in it for you

• Part of our 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
• Flexible and hybrid working arrangements! (we try to accommodate where it’s possible, so feel free to ask us more about this)
• Wellness and well-being with access to OpenUp psychologists
• Dog friendly 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 great opportunities for learning and development, including access to external educational events & trainings, access to our inhouse LEARN platform with diverse courses, training, and workshops, and various opportunities for you to develop your skills
• Regular team events & socials