Engineering Manager – Auctions (m/w/d)

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

Apply now — your CV is enough.