You will build up a new software engineering team, which will be in charge for developing state of the art software to support the companies key initiative: increase speed and agility of innovation! Our customer benefits from many years of successful company history and is one of the strongest players in the retail market and strongly growing in the food service provider business. Today, they have operations in many European countries and have recently extended businesses into the US. The company is now building up an internal engineering team with the goal to increase the speed and agility of innovation. For this, we are searching a highly motivated and experienced leader to head up the team in the role of:

Head of Software Engineering 80 – 100%(F/M)

You will be responsible for the overall team output and as such, the top developer inside the company. As the interface between your team, the product management team and the rest of the company, you will be translating business needs into architectural decisions and manageable features. Besides your management duties and role as main software architect – preferably also develop high quality software code yourself. Your team is embedded in the Digital unit which operates at group level. This means you will be delivering projects with high visibility across all units and all countries with operations. Your projects will be varied, acting as an internal service provider, developing the digital team’s own initiatives and even launching in-house startups.

Your key Responsibilities

• Manage your team of software engineers and data scientists, working across backend, frontend and mobile


• Take architectural decisions and defend them towards all stakeholders


• Lead by example by writing well-tested, concise code across the stack


• Choose the right tools and institute good development practices


• Improve and maintain the current production environment, for example by adding monitoring and alerting (DevOps)


• Set up a modern development workflow for your team, including a continuous integration pipeline and automated deployments


• Be the interface between the development team, the product management team and other stakeholders


• Manage the hiring process and grow/develop your team


• Support the developers in your team with technical guidance

your personality

• Minimum of 5 years of software development experience in a general-purpose programming language


• Minimum BSc degree in Computer Science, similar technical field of study or equivalent practical experience


• Leadership experience in similar role


• Proven history of taking or influencing major architectural decisions


• Lived or instituted good development practices like testing, code reviews, agile development


• Likeable personality with good communication skills


• Ability to quickly get up to speed in any programming language or system if needed


• Ability to tackle problems outside your comfort zone and get things done without supervision


• Excellent spoken and written communication skills in English

additional Desirable skills and experiences

• Experience in any of the following programming languages: Java, C/C++, C#, Python, JavaScript, Rust or Go


• Experience working with one or more from the following topics: web application development, Unix/Linux environments, distributed and parallel systems, service oriented architectures, REST APIs, developing large software systems


• Expert knowledge of Git or another DVCS


• Good spoken and written knowledge of German


• 9 out of 12 points on “The Joel Test” (www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/)

your perspectives This will be one of the few opportunities to play a major role in a key initiative in a large international organization, right from the beginning! You will be in charge to build products for a customer base of more than 5 million people across 5 countries. You will have access to resources of a big corporate but get the freedom of working in an uncomplicated environment. The company does fully support flexible working models e.g. home office, if you whish to benefit from this. Finally, personal development will be supported to develop required skills - and an attractive compensation package, reflecting the importance of this role, will be offered.