Backend Team Lead

Smart Host is a B2B SaaS platform helping hotels turn fragmented guest and booking data into actionable insights.

For 2026, we’re taking the platform to the next level by building a broader hospitality ecosystem that connects selected technology partners to improve the guest experience across the entire hotel journey.

What you'll do

As our Backend Team Lead, you will lead the engineering efforts behind our core hospitality platform and directly manage a team of 4-5 backend engineers. You will report directly to the CTO. This is a technical leadership role with a meaningful hands‑on component: you will spend roughly 40% of your time on backend engineering, architecture, code reviews, and technical decision‑making, and 60% on team leadership, mentoring, planning, and cross‑functional collaboration. You will help ensure our architecture scales as our customer base grows.

Your tasks in a nutshell:

• Technical Leadership: Lead and mentor a team of backend engineers, supporting a culture of ownership, transparency, and continuous learning.
• Architectural Ownership: Own the backend services, APIs, integrations, and business logic behind our core hospitality platform, ensuring the system is built for scale and resilience.
• Manage Complexity: Identify and reduce technical debt, improve existing systems, and rethink architecture when necessary.
• AI-Augmented Engineering Culture: Champion the team’s use of modern AI development tools, helping engineers integrate them into their daily workflow while maintaining high standards for code quality and architectural integrity.

What you bring

• Relevant Leadership Experience: You have 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience, including 2+ years leading engineers through mentoring, code reviews, knowledge sharing, and team development.
• Strong Java Background: You are highly proficient in Java and have deep experience with the Spring Boot ecosystem.
• Cloud Native: You have experience with Kubernetes and modern backend tooling, including Helm, Terraform, and Gradle.
• Systems Thinker: You understand the fundamentals of networking, distributed computing, and asynchronous messaging.
• Ownership Mindset: You take responsibility beyond your immediate task and dig deep into the stack to find and fix the source of a problem.
• Pragmatic Engineer: You care about clean code and refactoring but understand the balance between perfection and time‑to‑market in a startup.
• AI-Forward Mindset: You’re hands‑on with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, agentic workflows) and have opinions on using them well. You see them as a force multiplier for senior engineers, not a gimmick, and you have a point of view on what they’re good at and where they still fall short.
• Fluency in English: You communicate fluently in English, both verbally and in writing. German skills are an advantage.
• Entitlement to work in Germany: You are legally entitled to work in Germany and do not require visa sponsorship. For legal hiring reasons, we can only consider candidates based in Germany for this role.

Why Smart Host

• Real impact: You will have direct influence on technical decisions, architecture, and the growth of our backend team.
• Hybrid or remote within Germany: Work hybrid from our Berlin office or remotely from within Germany. We occasionally bring the team together in Berlin for workshops, planning, and collaboration.
• Team culture: Join a diverse, multicultural team with an open office culture and a few four‑legged colleagues.
• Smart Host Days - Team Travel: Once a year, we take the whole team on a trip abroad. The trip combines team bonding, training, and the chance to live our mission: making vacation smart.