Engineering Manager – Auctions (m/w/d)

Description

Thousands of dealers bid on our platform, and every bid runs through the system your team owns. Real-time auctions, every selling modality, seven engineers from mid-level to staff, and a dedicated Product Manager. You decide where it goes next.

Location: Central Berlin – hybrid, with 3 days in our office and 2 days from home.

CarOnSale is the AI-powered platform for B2B used car trading in Europe. Over 40,000 buyers from more than 20 countries trade on our platform — and 85% of inventory is exclusive to us. We connect software, pricing intelligence, logistics and financing in one layer — as the operating system for an entire industry.

One Platform. One Profit Engine.

Responsibilities

• You lead the TRX team: real-time auctioning and the selling modalities at the core of our platform. Seven engineers across backend, web and mobile, working with a dedicated Product Manager, across European and Brazilian time zones.
• You own the team's technical direction. You set the strategy for the auction domain, tie it to OKRs, and make the architecture calls with the team.
• You own delivery and quality. You run the delivery method, decide which testing layers carry which risks, and make sure what ships holds up under live auctions.
• You own the team's technical metrics: what is tracked, what alerts, and what happens when it fires.
• You build the team. You hire, level, grow, and when needed, manage people out.
• You run the people processes: onboarding, growth plans, a regular feedback cadence, and mentoring across levels.
• You balance product and engineering. You say no to engineering work in business terms and no to product work in risk terms, and you can defend the call either way.
• You push AI adoption in the team and use AI tooling in your own work.
• What you bring
• 8+ years as a software engineer in individual contributor roles before moving into management. You don't need to code day to day, but you have coded heavily and still think in architecture and design.
• 2+ years managing engineers as their line manager, with performance and hiring responsibility. Tech lead time does not count here.
• Depth in distributed systems: services, concurrency, data consistency.
• A team you assembled yourself, not only one you inherited: people you hired, levelled and grew.
• A delivery methodology you have run, whether Scrum, Kanban or one you shaped, plus a clear view of testing layers and how to apply them.
• A technical strategy you owned for a team or a domain, tied to OKRs or another form of technical governance.
• An AI-first way of working: you use tools like Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot every day and have driven adoption in a team.
• English at C1 level or above — it is our working language.

Requirements

• Real-time or event-driven systems under real load
• Object-oriented and domain-driven design
• Experience under more than one delivery methodology, and a view on how they compare
• A team taken through a monolith-to-services migration or its aftermath, or a team you stabilised
• Managing a team distributed across time zones
• A background in marketplaces, auctions, automotive, payments or trading
• Our stack: TypeScript and NestJS, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Heroku, Angular on web, Flutter on mobile
• German

Benefits

• Hybrid working: 3 days in office, 2 days remote – plus 25 "Work from Anywhere" days per year
• 28 days annual leave
• 2× annual career & development conversations
• Company pension with 20% employer contribution
• Fully paid Deutschlandticket (public transport)
• FitX membership or Urban Sports Club subsidy
• Virtual stock options — share in the upside
• Modern IT setup for your day-to-day work
• Structured onboarding with buddy programme and social events
• Lived diversity: active women's network, meditation & prayer room
• Apply now — your CV is enough.