Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager — Berlin (hybrid/remote-friendly across Europe) — €120,000–150,000

About the company

Our client helps general contractors run one of the most time-consuming parts of building anything large, such as residential towers, office complexes, or train stations: finding and working with the right subcontractors for every specialised trade. They help contractors structure "bid packages," the full document set a subcontractor needs (specifications, quantities, requirements) to decide whether to bid and how to price it. This replaces a process that's traditionally manual, slow, and error-prone.

2025 was a strong year: they beat their targets significantly, and 2026 is continuing that trend. The business is essentially profitable (a small, deliberate loss from growth investment), they've just closed a new funding round, and they're scaling the engineering org from 3 teams to 5 over the next year. Remote-first with a Berlin office, with the whole company gathering twice a year for full-week working sessions.

The role

They're hiring two Engineering Managers to take direct leadership of two of three engineering teams (a third already has an EM). This is not a people-management-only role. More than half your time will still be spent writing code and working directly on the product. People leadership sits on top of a strong technical foundation, not instead of it.

You'll lead a team of 5–6 engineers (a mix of full-stack and AI/ML), reporting directly to the Co-Founder and CTO. You'll take over one of two teams:

• Platform team : the foundations of the platform on the general-contractor side: authentication, authorisation, DevOps, marketplace dynamics, matching and ranking.
• Documents team : everything around bills of quantities and construction documents, including an AI agent for creating and working with those documents.

What you'll do

• Lead a team of 5–6 engineers day to day: own performance evaluations and give clear, regular feedback.
• Stay genuinely hands-on: sit with engineers, review code, and advise on architecture.
• Work closely with product to unblock delivery and turn vague product ideas into technical execution.
• Manage delivery against team goals.
• Over time, help define how the engineering org scales from 3 teams to 5+. This role has a credible path to Director or VP Engineering as the company grows.

What we're looking for

• Substantial hands-on TypeScript experience, both frontend and backend, on large-scale applications.
• Strong people-leadership skills (1:1s, performance management, mentoring) from real line-management experience, not just informal leadership.
• Technical level comparable to a principal engineer, not below.
• Experience in a high-growth startup environment (Series A to C or equivalent); culture fit matters as much here as it would for a founding engineer.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills, comfortable working across product and leadership.
• Nice to have: familiarity with AI engineering, LLM integrations, or ML-adjacent work.

Interview process

1. Screening call (30 min) with one of the team's engineers: technical background and leadership experience.
2. Coding challenge (90 min): the same one used for full-stack engineering hires. Technical ability here is non-negotiable.
3. In-depth interview (60 min) with the CTO: leadership experience, technical depth, and cultural fit.

Hit apply or drop me (Sam Barcia) a connection request to find out more information!