Head of Engineering (m/f/d)

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential cleantech software company in München that is building critical infrastructure for European energy management. This is a senior engineering leadership role reporting directly to the founders—there is no CTO layer above this position. You will lead a lean, high-performing engineering organization of 11 people across two squads, own the technical direction, and remain hands-on with architecture and code.

This role suits an experienced engineering leader who has run teams in fast-moving product companies, stayed close to technical work, and delivered predictable results with minimal process overhead.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow an 11-person engineering team including two squad leads, owning hiring, performance, development, and retention
• Set the technical direction for the platform: multi-tenant SaaS, time-series data pipelines, IoT integration, forecasting services, and automation systems
• Own quarterly roadmap execution in close partnership with Product, surfacing dependencies and making trade-off decisions
• Ensure reliability, manage on-call processes, lead incident response and postmortems, and maintain security and compliance posture
• Make architecture and build-vs-buy decisions that scale with data volume, customer growth, and team expansion
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and domain experts to build solutions grounded in real-world regulatory and operational constraints
• Keep processes lean and effective—appropriate for an 11-person team, not a corporate environment
• Manage cloud spend and operational efficiency

What We're Looking For

Must have:

• 3+ years leading engineering teams in product companies, including management of senior engineers or squad leads
• Hands-on leadership experience in lean teams without multiple management layers—you have done the work yourself, not only delegated it
• Proven track record owning delivery predictability and production system reliability for real customers, with measurable before-and-after improvement
• Strong technical depth in at least two of: cloud and distributed backend systems, multi-tenant SaaS, high-volume or time-series data pipelines, IoT and real-time telemetry, or ML/optimization in production—deep enough to make architecture calls and earn engineers' trust
• Direct experience running hiring and performance management, including growing people and managing performance issues when necessary
• Ownership mindset toward incident management, security, and compliance—you run these, you don't just delegate them
• Clear written and spoken English; German is a strong advantage given the client's customer base

Nice to have:

• Experience in energy, industrial software, or physical-world domains
• Previous experience as the most senior technical leader in an organization (CTO, VP Engineering, or similar)

Not required:

• Being the strongest coder on the team—you need to read code, contribute architecturally, and occasionally build, but not out-code everyone
• A "Head of" title already—we evaluate what you have accomplished, not what your previous title was

How We Work with You

Candidates apply through Get A Job.ai. Our talent team will conduct an initial screening to understand your background and leadership approach. If there is a strong match, we will submit your profile to our client for their review. Please do not attempt to contact the client directly—all communication and coordination will go through our recruiting team to ensure a smooth, professional process for everyone involved.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process based on your experience and the client's salary framework for this role.

Get A Job.ai is an equal opportunity recruiter. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic.