Engineering Manager - Pre-ordering (m/f/d)

Description

You will lead the Pre-Ordering engineering team, which builds and ships across backend, web, iOS and Android together with Design and Analytics.

The team owns each problem from start to finish, including the solution and the result it produces.

The area covers everything a customer does before checkout: sign-up, login, the profile, the subscription programme, the Explore page, search, categories, deals, the in-house recommender and third-party integrations.

Your decisions shape how quickly millions of customers find groceries, how often they return, and how well the company can sell retail media to brands, a meaningful share of its revenue.

The company is a quick commerce provider in Europe with about 3,000 products and deliveries in minutes. It launched in February 2021, operates in more than 90 cities in Germany and the Netherlands, generated more than EUR 400m in 2024 and is operationally profitable. Investors include Prosus, Mubadala and Bond, with Doordash and REWE as strategic investors.

The team is the first thing customers see in the app, from signing up and logging in to the home screen, search, categories and deals. The company is hiring an experienced engineering manager to lead it.

Responsibilities

• Hire, onboard and manage the performance of engineers, and keep improving how you attract talent.
• Give every team member a clear career path and regular, practical feedback.
• Push the team to get a little better every day.
• Work with Product, Design and Analytics on search relevance, personalising the Explore page, simpler sign-up and login across devices, a more valuable subscription programme, and new retail media placements that do not get in the way of shopping.
• Own the services behind the home screen, search, categories, product pages, the recommender, accounts and authentication, subscriptions and third-party integrations.
• The Pricing team sets prices and promotions. Your team decides how customers see them.
• Shape the technical strategy, including server-driven UI so changes reach iOS, Android and web without an app release.
• Take part in architecture discussions, RFCs and trade-off decisions, and push for reliability, observability and practical engineering.
• Set the standard for production operations: SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, alerting and incident response for login, home, search and product pages.
• Run blameless postmortems that lead to lasting fixes.
• Free time for automated tests, lower operational load, simpler systems and self-service tools.
• Run short, fixed time-boxed builds with clear scope, in a Shape Up-style process that is still taking shape, and help shape it.
• Help the team use coding agents such as Claude Code daily for writing, testing, reviewing and porting code, and improve the agent instructions and skills in the repositories.
• Build a culture where the best idea wins, debate leads to committed action, and wins are celebrated together.
• Help the team weigh shipping against quality when it comes to security.
• Work closely with peer engineering managers and with Retail Media, Commercial, Marketing and Operations, explaining technical limits in business terms.

Requirements

• You enjoy building robust systems and strong teams, and you handle a fast pace and hard problems at scale well.
• You have built psychological safety, coached engineers and given direct, caring feedback.
• You have a record of hiring, developing and keeping strong engineering teams.
• You know backend systems and microservices and how they serve mobile and web clients.
• You can take part in architecture discussions and guide a team to good trade-offs.
• You have run high-reliability services using SLIs/SLOs, observability and incident management.
• You can turn complex technical issues into clear business impact for different audiences.
• You have worked on consumer e-commerce products such as home screens, search, onboarding or subscriptions, using experiments and data to decide what to build.
• You have used coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex and helped a team adopt them.
• You have worked on search, recommendation or personalisation systems, including with Data Science.
• You have worked in retail media or ad tech.
• You have worked on identity and authentication and handled personal data under GDPR.
• You have built agentic customer experiences, such as AI assistants or MCP, or are ready to grow into this area.
• You are familiar with marketplaces or quick commerce.

Conditions

The role is remote-friendly, with at least one day per week at the Berlin headquarters.

The Berlin office is modern, dog-friendly and located in the city centre, with many lunch options within a short walk.

Applicants are assessed on skills alone, without regard to age, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability or religion.

Benefits

• A €1,000 annual learning and development budget and individual coaching.
• 26 days of vacation, increasing by one day each year up to 30 days.
• A mobility budget of 35 EUR per month toward the Deutschland Ticket.
• A discount on an Urban Sports Club membership.
• Company pension options.
• Unlimited access to the MyAcademy e-learning platform, including online German courses.
• Online discounts through Corporate Benefits and Future Bens.
• A discount on your personal orders, and the chance to try new products first.