Senior Lead - Engineering Manager - China Digital Tech

Leads the China Digital Tech team, a group of approximately 6–7 engineers, focused primarily on the WeChat Mini Program and China digital commerce ecosystem. It combines practical people management with hands-on engineering leadership, guiding engineers through architecture, system design, code standards, testing, and AI-native engineering practices. The role partners closely with the Product Manager, who drives product scoping, prioritisation, and business stakeholder alignment, so the postholder can focus on technical strategy, engineering execution, system quality, and growing a high-performing team.

• Lead, coach, and support a team of 6–7 software engineers across the China Digital Tech domain, providing regular 1:1s, actionable feedback, career development guidance, and performance management.
• Foster a culture of high ownership, psychological safety, continuous learning, and engineering craftsmanship, while balancing hands-on technical involvement with empowering engineers to own designs, decisions, and delivery end-to-end.
• Build a healthy, sustainable delivery rhythm through clear sprint goals, effective agile ceremonies, and continuous improvement.
• Guide the team on code standards, clean architecture, system design, automated testing, and CI/CD, and stay close to the codebase through architecture and design reviews, code reviews, prototyping, debugging, and critical technical decisions
• Helping engineers make pragmatic technical trade-offs that balance delivery speed with long-term system health.
• Ensure WeChat Mini Program and supporting backend/BFF services are modular, performant, secure, observable, and maintainable, and set clear expectations for automated testing (unit, integration, and end-to-end), release quality, and production readiness.
• Own the technical evolution and delivery of On's WeChat Mini Program and wider China digital consumer experiences, designing and evolving clean integrations between China front-end touchpoints (WeChat Mini Program, WeCom, local payment/social/CRM ecosystems) and regional/global commerce, order
• Inventory, and customer platforms, and translating local digital innovation into clean, reusable architectural patterns.
• Drive high standards for frontend and backend performance, UX responsiveness, peak-traffic readiness (campaigns, drops, key shopping festivals), and operational stability, including monitoring, alerting, SLOs, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Partner closely with the Product Manager to turn product vision and priorities into clear technical plans and reliable delivery, co-shaping solutions with engineering feasibility, architectural options, and effort/risk trade-offs, challenging assumptions constructively
• Providing transparent delivery forecasting and risk management, and connecting technical investments to tangible product and business outcomes.
• Champion AI-native engineering practices, including AI-assisted coding, code review, automated test generation, documentation, debugging, and design exploration, coach engineers to use AI effectively and responsibly, experiment with practical AI-native workflows such as prompt patterns
• Coding agents, test harnesses, and developer productivity automation, share learnings across the China Tech Hub, and measure improvements in velocity, quality, and developer experience.
• Collaborate with platform, architecture, security, and engineering teams across Shanghai and global hubs to align on shared APIs, service boundaries, and engineering standards, ensure clean integration with global platforms while respecting local ecosystem realities, and contribute to hiring
• Onboarding, and raising the engineering bar of the Shanghai Tech Hub.

• Hands-on engineering leader who cares deeply about software craftsmanship, system design, and helping engineers do the best work of their careers, while staying deeply connected to the technology.
• 2+ years of hands-on Engineering Management or Tech Lead Manager experience leading agile software engineering teams, on top of a strong foundation as a senior software engineer.
• Has moved past being a first-time manager and knows how to run and coach a team effectively.
• Deep technical experience in China's digital ecosystem, particularly building, scaling, and operating WeChat Mini Programs and consumer-facing digital commerce or retail applications.
• Strong full-stack or backend/BFF architectural foundation, with hands-on proficiency in modern web/mini-program technologies (TypeScript / JavaScript, WeChat Mini Program frameworks) and backend services (Node.js / NestJS, Golang, or Java).
• Proven track record of guiding engineers on engineering best practices, including clean code standards, modular architecture, API and system design, automated testing strategies, code reviews, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Practical experience with AI-assisted software engineering, actively using and coaching teams on AI coding assistants, automated test generation, and AI-driven developer productivity workflows.
• Strong product collaboration mindset, with demonstrated success partnering closely with Product Managers on technical scoping, effort estimation, trade-off decisions, and iterative delivery.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems and production operations, including API design, caching, performance optimization, high-concurrency campaign readiness, observability, and incident management.
• Clear, empathetic leadership style—able to coach junior-to-senior engineers, give constructive feedback, and build an accountable, collaborative team culture.
• Excellent communication skills in both English and Mandarin, with the ability to collaborate effectively across local product/business partners and global engineering teams.

• Experience leading teams of 5–8+ engineers.

• China Tech Hub / Shanghai Tech Hub

• Dynamic, challenging, and highly international environment at one of the fastest-growing sportswear companies in the world.
• Opportunity to lead a talented team shaping digital experiences that connect millions of runners and customers in China with On.
• Work closely with strong engineers, product leaders, and global tech peers while helping build a strategic technology hub in Shanghai.
• Opportunity to stay close to modern technology and AI-native engineering.
• Opportunity to mentor and grow engineers.
• Opportunity to partner closely with Digital Product.
• Opportunity to make a visible impact on On's digital growth in China.