Senior Engineering Manager (Full Stack/Backend) | Privacy & Identity Platform | Berlin | 140.000 EUR + Bonus + Equity

Compensation and benefits

€130k-140k base + 15% annual bonus + equity (VSOPs)

Hybrid working from Berlin, flexible hours

Unlimited vacation, learning budget, home office allowance, Urban Sports Club membership

The company

A well-funded technology company on a mission to change how data ownership works on the internet. They're building the trust and identity infrastructure that modern digital services increasingly need - privacy-first, decentralised, and genuinely differentiated in a space that's only getting more important.

Small, senior team. Serious technical culture. Berlin-based with a globally distributed engineering organisation.

The role

This is a hands‑on Senior Engineering Manager position leading a core platform team. You will own delivery, architecture direction, and the technical bar for a team of 7-12 engineers building distributed systems at the intersection of identity, privacy, and data ownership.

The key thing to understand about this role: it is not a coordination or programme management position. The expectation is that you stay technically close to the work. You will act as a quality gate between product intent and engineering execution - scoping ambiguity out before it reaches your team, catching architectural issues at the design stage, and running system design conversations rather than just sitting in them. If you've deliberately stayed hands‑on as you've grown into leadership, this is the role for you.

What you'll do

• Lead a cross-functional engineering team delivering on a high-scale, privacy-first platform - primarily TypeScript, Node.js and React
• Own architecture decisions, ADRs, and the RFC process for your domain
• Act as a technical filter upstream of your team - the person who catches the hard problems before they become expensive ones
• Partner with Product and Design to shape technical vision and roadmap
• Hire, grow and retain strong engineers, including building pathways to Staff and Principal level
• Champion engineering excellence: clean architecture, CI/CD, TDD, observability and performance
• Drive AI‑assisted development practices and contribute to an agentic engineering culture

What they're looking for

• 5+ years in engineering management, with experience leading through other EMs or senior engineers
• Strong hands‑on technical foundation in TypeScript, Node.js and cloud‑native backend systems (AWS preferred)
• Real system design depth - you can lead a system design session, not just participate in one
• Experience operating distributed systems at meaningful scale in a production environment
• Background in regulated, security‑conscious or privacy‑adjacent domains (identity, fintech, compliance) is a significant advantage
• Startup or scale‑up experience - comfortable with ambiguity and building from first principles
• Familiarity with modern AI engineering tooling (Claude Code, LangChain, MCP or similar) is a strong signal
• Based in Berlin or open to relocating