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CarOnSale is an AI-powered B2B marketplace for used car trading in Europe, connecting over 40,000 buyers from 20+ countries with 85% exclusive inventory. The platform integrates software, pricing intelligence, logistics, and financing as an operating system for the automotive industry.
You will lead the TRX (real-time auctions) team of seven engineers spanning backend, web, and mobile, working alongside a dedicated Product Manager across European and Brazilian time zones. This is a hands-on management role with full ownership of the auction domain—the core system through which thousands of dealer bids flow daily.
Key responsibilities:
- Lead and grow a seven-person engineering team: hiring, leveling, performance management, and mentoring across levels
- Own technical strategy for the auction domain, tied to OKRs, and make architecture decisions with the team
- Drive delivery and quality: define the delivery methodology, testing layers, and ensure production stability under live auction load
- Establish and monitor technical metrics, alerting, and incident response
- Balance product and engineering priorities: defend trade-offs in business and risk terms
- Champion AI adoption in the team and use AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot) in your own work
- Run people processes: onboarding, growth plans, regular feedback cadence, and mentoring
The role is hybrid: 3 days in the Berlin office, 2 days remote, plus 25 "Work from Anywhere" days annually.
Requirements:
- 8+ years as a software engineer in individual contributor roles before management (coding heavily in architecture and design)
- 2+ years managing engineers as a line manager with performance and hiring responsibility (tech lead time does not count)
- Deep expertise in distributed systems: services, concurrency, data consistency
- Proven track record assembling and growing a team you hired (not inherited)
- Experience running a delivery methodology (Scrum, Kanban, or custom) with clear views on testing layers
- Owned technical strategy for a team or domain, tied to OKRs or similar governance
- AI-first working style: daily use of Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot; demonstrated team adoption
- English at C1 level or above (working language)
Nice to have:
- Real-time or event-driven systems under production load
- Object-oriented and domain-driven design
- Experience with multiple delivery methodologies
- Led monolith-to-services migration or team stabilization
- Managing distributed teams across time zones
- Background in marketplaces, auctions, automotive, payments, or trading
- Stack experience: TypeScript, NestJS, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Heroku, Angular, Flutter
- German language skills
