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 Screening call (30 min) with one of the team's engineers: technical background and leadership experience.Coding challenge (90 min): the same one used for full-stack engineering hires. Technical ability here is non-negotiable.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!