Hands-On Engineering Manager

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Germany.

📋 Description

• You will lead your engineering team both technically and organizationally while remaining actively involved in coding — architecture decisions, code reviews, technical designs, and your own implementations will continue to be integral to your daily activities.

• You will serve as a collaborative partner for Product, jointly addressing the crucial question: “What is the simplest, most sensible V1 we can launch quickly?”

• You will ensure that AI outputs remain reliable and consistent through evaluation and observability tools, prompt versioning, quality metrics, and regression monitoring.

• You will introduce structure to development processes, releases, team rituals, and incident management — all done pragmatically, without unnecessary bureaucracy.

• You will conduct regular one-on-one meetings, provide constructive feedback, and foster the professional and personal development of your engineers.

• You will translate business requirements into feasible technical plans, making progress, risks, and dependencies transparent, while representing Engineering in crucial discussions.

⛳️ Requirements

• Relevant experience: A minimum of 5 years in professional software development, during which you have led or technically guided developers — for instance, as an Engineering Manager, Tech Lead, Senior/Staff Engineer with team responsibilities, or Founding Engineer.

• Continued coding: You wish to remain technically engaged and are not looking to move entirely away from coding.

• Technical depth: A solid grasp of modern backend architectures, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and production-ready software development is essential.

• Stack: Familiarity with Python/Django is a plus — however, this is not required if you can swiftly adapt to new stacks.

• AI proximity: Experience with AI-related products, LLM APIs (such as OpenAI, Claude, etc.), automation, or data-driven workflows is a distinct advantage.

• Startup mindset: You come from startups, scale-ups, or fast-paced product organizations and are comfortable taking ownership and navigating short decision paths.

• Communication: You articulate technical trade-offs with clarity — to both developers and non-technical stakeholders.

• Proficiency in German and English is mandatory.

🏝️ Benefits

• Remote-first culture: Work from anywhere within Germany.

• Competitive compensation ranging from €85,000 to €100,000 — your contributions are recognized: if you deliver more, you can earn more.

• Additional fair bonus schemes.

• Hardware setup: Let us know what you need — or bring your own hardware.

• A team of experienced colleagues who support one another — whether it's for addressing open questions or enjoying a virtual coffee in the afternoon.

• Family-friendly policies: Sick child, daycare closure, or school-holiday leave? Not an issue.

• Responsibility and equal footing from day one — ample opportunity to shape your role within an environment where leadership and hands-on engineering coexist, free from unnecessary corporate structures.

• Urban Sports Club membership and team events are included.