About the role
Your mission We're looking for product-minded engineers to join our diverse and driven team. We really value collaboration, making an impact, and continuous learning. Our product development team is based in Berlin, but we have folks working all over Europe, and you'll work closely with an experienced and supportive team. Your profile We are looking for an Engineering Manager with a strong backend engineering background to lead one of our engineering teams, combining technical depth with people leadership in a senior, product-minded team that values collaboration, impact, and continuous learning. We're a distributed engineering team working across Europe (within +/- 1 hour of CET); topi is headquartered in Berlin. Our engineering organization is organized into small, focused teams of senior engineers. You'll lead one of these teams day-to-day: setting direction, coaching engineers, partnering with Product and Design, and being accountable for delivery. This is a hands-on management role. We expect you to write and ship production code alongside your team, and to be deep in technical discussions, code reviews, system design conversations, and architectural decisions, especially on the backend . Your judgment shapes both how
the team works and what it builds. You'll join an experienced and supportive engineering leadership team where you'll have a significant voice in shaping the organization, the engineering culture, and the product itself. About You This is a role for an engineering leader who has earned their stripes as an engineer and now finds their leverage in growing the people around them. You'll thrive here if you can: Own the Outcomes of a Team: Be accountable for what your team ships, quality, pace, and direction, without becoming the bottleneck. Grow Engineers: Coach a team of mostly senior engineers, set a clear bar for excellence, and create the conditions for them to do their best work. Bridge Product and Engineering: Partner closely with Product and Design to shape roadmaps, balance trade-offs, and turn ambiguous strategy into shipped features. Stay Hands-On, Especially on the Backend: Write and ship code with your team, read code fluently, ask the right questions in system design reviews, and weigh in on backend architectural decisions with credibility. Build a Healthy Team: Run lightweight, effective rituals (1:1s, retros, planning); give and receive honest feedback; protect focus and sustainability. Agentic Engineering Mindset: You treat AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, and the like) as real collaborators, not autocomplete. You own every line that ships under your name, whether you typed it or an agent did. You're motivated to deep-dive into agent workflows and bring the judgment that turns agent output into production-grade code. To Be Successful in This Role, You'll Need: Engineering Experience: at least 6+ years of professional software engineering experience in a production environment, with a strong backend track record , building, scaling, and operating server-side systems and APIs in production. Management Experience: at least 3+ years managing engineering teams of 4 or more people, including 1:1s, performance management, hiring, and team-level delivery.
