Engineering Manager – Auctions (m/w/d)
CarOnSale · Berlin
Thousands of dealers bid on our platform, and every bid runs through the system your team owns. Real-time auctions, every selling modality, seven engineers from mid-level to staff, and a dedicated Product Manager. You decide where it goes next.
Location: Central Berlin – hybrid, with 3 days in our office and 2 days from home.
About us
CarOnSale is the AI-powered platform for B2B used car trading in Europe. Over 40,000 buyers from more than 20 countries trade on our platform — and 85% of inventory is exclusive to us. We connect software, pricing intelligence, logistics and financing in one layer — as the operating system for an entire industry.
One Platform. One Profit Engine.
What you'll do
- You lead the TRX team: real-time auctioning and the selling modalities at the core of our platform. Seven engineers across backend, web and mobile, working with a dedicated Product Manager, across European and Brazilian time zones.
- You own the team's technical direction. You set the strategy for the auction domain, tie it to OKRs, and make the architecture calls with the team.
- You own delivery and quality. You run the delivery method, decide which testing layers carry which risks, and make sure what ships holds up under live auctions.
- You own the team's technical metrics: what is tracked, what alerts, and what happens when it fires.
- You build the team. You hire, level, grow, and when needed, manage people out.
- You run the people processes: onboarding, growth plans, a regular feedback cadence, and mentoring across levels.
- You balance product and engineering. You say no to engineering work in business terms and no to product work in risk terms, and you can defend the call either way.
- You push AI adoption in the team and use AI tooling in your own work.
What you bring
- 8+ years as a software engineer in individual contributor roles before moving into management. You don't need to code day to day, but you have coded heavily and still think in architecture and design.
- 2+ years managing engineers as their line manager, with performance and hiring responsibility. Tech lead time does not count here.
- Depth in distributed systems: services, concurrency, data consistency.
- A team you assembled yourself, not only one you inherited: people you hired, levelled and grew.
- A delivery methodology you have run, whether Scrum, Kanban or one you shaped, plus a clear view of testing layers and how to apply them.
- A technical strategy you owned for a team or a domain, tied to OKRs or another form of technical governance.
- An AI-first way of working: you use tools like Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot every day and have driven adoption in a team.
- English at C1 level or above — it is our working language.
Nice to have
- Real-time or event-driven systems under real load
- Object-oriented and domain-driven design
- Experience under more than one delivery methodology, and a view on how they compare
- A team taken through a monolith-to-services migration or its aftermath, or a team you stabilised
- Managing a team distributed across time zones
- A background in marketplaces, auctions, automotive, payments or trading
- Our stack: TypeScript and NestJS, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Heroku, Angular on web, Flutter on mobile
- German
What we offer
- Hybrid working: 3 days in office, 2 days remote – plus 25 "Work from Anywhere" days per year
- 28 days annual leave
- 2× annual career & development conversations
- Company pension with 20% employer contribution
- Fully paid Deutschlandticket (public transport)
- FitX membership or Urban Sports Club subsidy
- Virtual stock options — share in the upside
- Modern IT setup for your day-to-day work
- Structured onboarding with buddy programme and social events
- Lived diversity: active women's network, meditation & prayer room
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