Head of Engineering

Department: Engineering

Location: Berlin

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

This is a player-coach Head of Engineering role at an early-stage B2B SaaS company in the construction technology and AI space. You will work directly with the founders to own the technical direction end-to-end, from infrastructure and architecture through to building and mentoring a team of five senior engineers. The role carries real hands-on responsibility alongside strategic leadership, making it a strong fit for someone who wants both depth and breadth of impact.

What You'll Do

• Own the technical roadmap and architecture evolution, setting code quality standards and team processes.

• Make pragmatic decisions at the intersection of speed and quality across the full stack and infrastructure.

• Drive technical vision for core platform capabilities including data lineage, document processing at scale, AI evaluation pipelines, and semantic search.

• Work hands-on architecting and implementing complex features alongside the engineering team.

• Make foundational stack decisions across TypeScript, Fastify, Python, Postgres, AWS, and AI integrations.

• Hire, mentor, and develop a small senior engineering team while defining hiring standards that scale.

• Build a high-feedback, low-ego engineering culture where ownership and growth are the norm.

• Partner with founders on product-engineering strategy and represent engineering in external conversations.

What We're Looking For

• Around 10 or more years of B2B SaaS full-stack development experience, including enterprise contexts.

• Proven track record scaling systems through multiple infrastructure iterations and managing technical debt at scale.

• Significant engineering leadership experience managing at least one team in a B2B SaaS environment.

• Experience scaling a B2B SaaS company from early stage (0 to 10 employees) with hands-on technical contributions.

• Hands-on fluency with TypeScript, modern web frameworks, and backend API design.

• Experience architecting data pipelines, document processing systems, or similarly data-intensive platforms.

• Solid cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure) covering databases, storage, and deployment automation.

• Experience integrating AI/ML systems into production applications or evaluating model performance.

• Background at a strong early-stage or growth-stage startup, with exposure to engineering excellence and still driven to build.

• Entrepreneurial or ex-founder background is a strong plus.

• Experience with Python, observability tooling, or enterprise system integrations (ERP, procurement platforms) is advantageous.

• Fluent English communication skills, written and spoken.

• Based in Berlin or willing to relocate for a fully on-site role.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: 145,000 to 210,000 EUR annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Full-time, on-site in Berlin, Germany (Berlin Mitte). Five days per week in the office; candidates must be Berlin-based or willing to relocate.