Director of Engineering – Catalogue (m|w|d)

As Director of Engineering you take end-to-end ownership of one of idealo’s most critical engineering domains. Catalogue is at the heart of our product: it turns millions of merchant offers into trusted, comparable and discoverable product information for our users. You will lead an organization of around 50 engineers across seven teams, working through Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders. Your responsibility goes beyond technology: you create the conditions for strong teams to deliver predictably, evolve our technical landscape and turn our product and business strategy into measurable outcomes. Reporting directly to our CTPO, you will have significant autonomy to shape how your area operates and develops.

About Your New Role

• Own the Catalogue engineering domain end-to-end. You are accountable for engineering delivery, quality, technical direction and the overall effectiveness of your area.
• Lead and develop engineering leaders. You directly lead our Operations Leads (Engineering Managers) and create clear accountability, high performance and strong leadership across your teams.
• Provide technical direction. Together with our Principal and Staff Engineers, you shape sustainable architectural decisions, challenge technical approaches and ensure consistency across teams without becoming a bottleneck.
• Improve engineering performance and predictability. You establish meaningful metrics and operating rhythms, identify risks early and continuously improve how reliably we turn commitments into outcomes.
• Reduce complexity and operational load. You help teams move away from recurring manual work and firefighting by addressing root causes, improving our systems and increasing automation.
• Drive AI-enabled engineering and automation. You identify where AI can meaningfully improve our products, engineering practices and catalogue operations while maintaining quality and trust.
• Partner closely with Product. Together with the Group Product Lead Catalogue, you translate product and business priorities into an executable roadmap and make conscious trade-offs when priorities, capacity or technical needs compete.
• Lead across boundaries. You work closely with other Engineering Directors, Data, Platform and senior stakeholders to manage dependencies and solve challenges that go beyond your own area.

Job Requirements

Skills & Requirements

• Several years of experience leading multiple software engineering teams, ideally in a Director, Head of Engineering, Senior Engineering Manager or comparable role.
• Proven experience leading through Engineering Managers or other engineering leaders, rather than primarily managing individual contributors directly.
• A track record of improving engineering performance, delivery predictability and accountability across multiple teams.
• Strong technical credibility based on a Software Engineering background and the ability to challenge and guide senior engineers on architecture and technical direction without needing to be hands‑on in the code.
• Experience driving organizational or engineering transformation and creating environments with clear ownership, autonomy and high performance.
• Strong understanding of modern, cloud-native software engineering environments and distributed systems.
• Strong Product Engineering mindset: you connect technical decisions and engineering investments to customer and business outcomes.
• Experience partnering with senior Product and business stakeholders and navigating competing priorities and dependencies.

At idealo you can expect

• You want to further your education? We take your personal development goals seriously and, in addition to our idealo Learning Hub, eLearning offerings (e.g., Udemy), coaching & mediation, we also offer you the opportunity to benefit individually from additional learning and development budget.
• And what about the office? Our office in the heart of Berlin offers free organic breakfast, excellent free lunch (vegan and vegetarian), as well as free coffee, lemonades and after‑work beer, in addition to the "standard foosball". It also has a fabulous rooftop terrace with view of the whole of berlin where you can network with colleagues from our group of companies.
• In need of additional support in any areas of your life? We offer free counseling and support in all areas of life (professional, private, family, health, etc.) in cooperation with the pme‑Familienservice.
• You want full flexibility on your way to work and beyond? No problem with a job bike or Deutschlandticket - and it's environmentally friendly, too!
• Want to keep yourself fit? We offer many different fitness and sports options, such as an Urban Sports or Gympass membership, to suit your personal needs.
• And what else is there? Of course, success must be celebrated! In addition to team events, you can also expect big company events and other moments of organized connection with others in the company and your team throughout the year!