Simon McManus

Senior Engineering Manager

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+44 (0) 781 454 5689 smartphone
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summarize Summary

Senior Engineering Manager leading multi-team organisations, developing Engineering Managers, and enabling autonomous teams to deliver high-impact product and platform outcomes. Proven track record of scaling teams and driving measurable business impact, including £12.6M+ revenue uplift and modernisation of platforms serving millions of users.

work_history Experience

  1. Trainline - Senior Engineering Manager
    date_range September 2025 - present

    • Owned mission, strategy and delivery for Trainline’s search experience, improving how millions of customers discover and plan journeys, increasing engagement and conversion through rapid iteration and continuous experimentation.
    • Developed engineering leaders, coaching senior engineers into management roles and improving how teams were led, including 4 promotions to Engineering Manager. Mentored and developed Engineering Managers to enable more autonomous delivery across teams.
    • Led an organisation of 25+ engineers across 2–4 teams,, directly managing Engineering Managers and 3 Staff Engineers.
    • Managed performance across teams, addressing underperformance directly while maintaining a high bar for engineering and delivery excellence, and improving overall team effectiveness.
    • Introduced conversational interfaces through Trainline’s first ChatGPT-powered product, aligning multiple teams to deliver under tight timelines. Created a new way for customers to plan journeys using Trainline data, working with legal, risk and compliance to ensure safe use of customer data in production.

    Trainline - Engineering Manager
    date_range October 2021 - September 2025

    • Led a multi-year rebuild of Trainline’s core search platform (Shareable Search), replacing 9 legacy implementations with a single composable system used by millions daily, optimised for experimentation, introducing hypothesis driven development to help teams learn quickly from experiments and make better decisions.
    • Drove £12.6M+ annual revenue uplift by introducing experimentation capabilities and helping teams make decisions based on real user data.
    • Defined strategy, OKRs and roadmap for reusable web components, enabling teams to ship consistent customer experiences faster and with greater autonomy.
    • Drove company-wide improvements to engineering quality across ~200 repositories through automated standards, governance, and clear ownership models. By sharing these approaches across the organisation, multiple teams went on to build similar dashboards and adopt the same practices.
  2. Earlier Career

    Earlier career in senior and lead engineering roles across companies including NearForm, Domino’s, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, News UK, AKQA and BT.