Director of Engineering, Communications

The Communications Tribe The Communications Tribe is part of HelloFresh's Growth Alliance. Our mission is to enable a highly personalised, automated CRM communication ecosystem that prioritises user-centric engagement across our owned channels: email, push, SMS, in-app and embedded. The problems we are solving: • How anyone with a good reason to speak to customers can do it safely and in minutes. • How we make sure every customer gets the right message, at the right moment, through the right channel, so that our communication is truly personal. • How we move to an autonomous, self-optimising system that continuously learns from every past interaction and gets better with each send. • How we make sure we can reach our customers in their preferred channels. Our vision is to decentralise how HelloFresh talks to people across the whole relationship with us: prospects, subscribers and those who have left. Setting up and steering communications stops being the job of a small group of specialists and becomes something teams across the business can do safely, on top of tools and an intelligence layer that we build and that learn from every send. That loop reaches beyond CRM, so the customer experience is coherent from the first ad someone sees to the communication that converts and retains them. As Director of Engineering, Communications, you will lead the engineering organisation that makes this real. You will set technical direction, hold the bar for reliability and operational excellence, and partner with Product, Marketing and CRM teams to turn the vision into working systems. What you'll do • Lead the Communications engineering organisation through a layer of Engineering Leads and Staff Engineers, across Berlin and Warsaw. • Own the technical strategy for an autonomous, self-optimising communication system that learns from every interaction, and turn it into reality together with Product, Marketing and CRM teams. • Drive the move to true personalisation, so that every person we talk to gets the right message, at the right moment, through the right channel. • Build platforms that let teams across the business create and steer communications safely and on their own, inside clear guardrails. • Own the reliability and operational excellence of every system we run: SLOs, monitoring and alerting, incident management and on-call maturity, so that problems are caught before anyone downstream notices. • Expand our reach into new channels, from early experiments to scaled solutions, based on how people actually want to hear from us. • Lead our transformation into a GenAI-native engineering organisation, from AI-assisted development to agentic workflows embedded in everyday operations. • Manage, coach and develop Engineering Leads and Staff Engineers, holding them accountable for team health, delivery and engineering standards. • Navigate organisational change with maturity, keeping teams focused and motivated as priorities evolve. What you'll bring • Proven leadership at scale. 10+ years in software engineering, with 4+ years managing Engineering Managers or Leads. You have led teams across multiple offices and built trust without daily co-location. • Deep technical credibility. You can set direction for large-scale backend, data and event-driven systems, and you understand how applied machine learning and automated decisioning behave in production. • Platform thinking. A track record of building self-service platforms that enable non-engineers to work safely and quickly, including the governance and guardrails that make that possible. • AI-native leadership. You have built or scaled AI-native engineering practices and AI-driven products, not just adopted AI tools. • Operational excellence mindset. Strong grounding in S