Head of Engineering (f/m/d)

Description

The company gives finance teams tools to automate daily work and make forward-looking decisions.

It is the Finance AI platform for mid-sized businesses in Europe, offering real-time visibility and full control over spend through card issuing, invoice management and expenses.

Founded in Berlin, it serves more than 10,000 businesses, including Flink, Schufa, n8n and Auto1, and has raised €220+ million to date.

It operates in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and further EU markets, with 300+ people from 50+ nationalities across 5 offices in Europe.

In August 2026 it closed a €35 million Series C led by Portage, taking its valuation past €1 billion and making it one of Europe's newest fintech unicorns. Backers include Valar Ventures, Tiger Global, Global Founders Capital, Cherry Ventures and A-Star.

Hiring and rewards are based on the company's values: playing to win, obsessing over quality and winning as One the company.

You would lead engineering for one of the product tribes. Which tribe is confirmed with you during the process.

You report to the CTO and sit in a leadership trio with the Product Tribe Lead and the Design Lead. There is no management layer between you and the engineers.

This is a people leadership role with a hard technical bar. You manage the engineers directly and must also hold your own on system architecture.

Tribes hold people management, capacity, planning and reporting. Squads take on problem spaces and run discovery and delivery, each led by a trio of Tech Lead, Product Manager and Product Designer.

Tech Leads make the technical decisions in their squad, including estimates, and write code alongside their engineers, but they do not manage people. You do.

The structure stays flat and changes as the company learns, roughly every six months in practice rather than on a fixed schedule. Discovery and delivery run in parallel, so the next piece of work is scoped before the current one finishes.

Responsibilities

• Own tribe-wide delivery: the right problems solved at the right quality, as fast as possible.
• Manage 15 to 20 direct reports. Hire, onboard, set expectations, give feedback, develop people, recommend pay and promotions, and make the hard calls that keep talent strong.
• Use the performance signals Tech Leads send you, but make the decisions and hold the conversations yourself.
• Understand the tribe's systems and how they fit the company's wider architecture.
• Challenge estimates and technical proposals from your engineers. Do not produce the estimates yourself.
• Sit in the tribe trio as the feasibility voice on roadmap and planning. Debate solutions and trade-offs with the Product Tribe Lead as a technical peer, and push back on scope and timelines when engineering points that way.
• Set how the tribe plans, estimates, tracks and reports delivery. Share news, good and bad, early with the tribe and leadership.
• Put your strongest people on the highest-impact work. Move engineers between squads, and between tribes where it helps the company, while still letting people build deep domain knowledge.
• Align with peer Heads of Engineering and with platform and architecture owners. Settle shared architecture questions by agreement, not around people.
• Work with velocity and high agency on the right problems. Stay close to the work, know what your team builds, correct course in real time and get hands-on when speed or quality is at risk.
• Own outcomes beyond your team's boundary. Make changes elsewhere when needed, but tell people first.
• Bring product and design in from the start. If a gap exists in the trio, fill it or name it.
• Challenge decisions when it matters. Once a call is made, own the message and explain the reasoning, including on calls you argued against.
• Base decisions on real expertise, internal and external, rather than assumptions.
• Apply the company's single manager framework in full: build a high-performing team, define success clearly, deliver results with the team, and act with speed and ownership.

Requirements

• 4 to 6+ years in engineering management, managing engineers directly at a meaningful span.
• You have run hiring, performance management and difficult conversations yourself, not through managers below you.
• A senior or staff engineering background, with system design judgement that is current rather than historical.
• Strong system design: you read an architecture, spot where it will fail, argue alternatives with its builders, and tell a 2-week estimate from a 6-week one and explain why.
• Credibility as a technical peer to product leadership, having shaped roadmaps and scope through feasibility arguments and having lost some of them gracefully.
• Experience building the practices that make 15 to 20 direct reports work: clear expectations, regular feedback and visible delivery.
• Quick to reason about unfamiliar technical domains and useful before you have deep prior expertise in them.
• Experience in a mature engineering environment with code review, testing, incident handling, and planning and estimation that work, and the ability to build these where they are missing.

Conditions

Tech Leads own the how and write code, so the technical part of this role is judgement, challenge and architecture input rather than an individual contributor workload.

You manage engineers, not managers: every engineer in the tribe reports to you, there is no layer beneath you, and none is planned.

Equal-opportunity note: the company hires on values and merit, and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds.

Benefits

• Compensation at the top of the market, with equity included.
• Offices at the centre of the culture, with weekly breakfasts and Friday demos.
• 20 days of 'work from abroad'.
• 600 EUR/GBP learning and development budget.
• Other local benefits.
• Full-time benefits apply unless stated otherwise. Interns and working students receive a tailored package.
• Strong plus: a background at an AI product company or in ERP or financial systems.
• Strong plus: experience leading in a flat or tribe/squad-style organisation.
• Strong plus: experience with a Tech Lead / Engineering Manager split, on either side of it.