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: