Head of Engineering (Berlin, hybrid)

Your role at Kittl 🥁

Kittl's engineering team builds the product 11 million users rely on. As our Head of Engineering, you'll build the organisation behind it: you'll manage engineers directly and turn capable team leads into strong managers. You'll own how we deliver, which means finding what really slows us down, fixing the system and proving it worked, with the team we already have. Reporting to our CTO, Phil, you'll shape engineering strategy with him and work hand in hand with Product and Marketing so our capacity goes where Kittl is heading. If you want the organisation you leave behind to be your best work, this is the role.

What you'll do 📋️

• Grow your leads: Coach first-time team leads into confident managers, and manage your engineers directly with clear expectations and honest feedback

• Build the people basics: Set fair, consistent standards for performance, feedback, career growth and onboarding, much of it from scratch

• Unblock delivery: Find the real bottleneck, change the system and show that it worked, so delivery gets more predictable with the team we already have

• Own quality: Earn senior engineers' trust quickly and take real ownership of quality, so release decisions no longer depend on the CTO

• Connect up and across: Shape engineering strategy with the CTO, keep leadership updated on progress and risks, and turn strategy into what your teams actually work on

• Stay technically close: Weigh in on architecture and technical direction, and stay close enough to the code to make good calls

What you’ll need ✅️

• Experience: 8+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years managing engineering teams

• Leaders you've grown: You've turned senior engineers or team leads into managers, and can tell us who, how and what changed

• Delivery you've fixed: You've measurably improved how a team ships, without adding people to do it

• Technical credibility: Strong background in software development, architecture and systems design, in a TypeScript, React and Node.js stack. Senior engineers trust your calls

• People-first leadership: You get energy from growing people, and you've built teams others want to join

Interview process 🔍️

• Recruiter interview (45 min)

• CTO & People interview (70 min)

• Product & delivery interview (45 min)

• Meeting the team (2 × 30 min)

• Bar raiser interview with our Head of Data, plus lunch with the team leads in our Berlin office (45 min + lunch)

Our core tech stack 🤖

TypeScript, Python, Node.js, React, Next.js, Postgres, Pulumi, k8s