We're looking for product-minded engineers to join our diverse and driven team. We really value collaboration, making an impact, and continuous learning. Our product development team is based in Berlin, but we have folks working all over Europe, and you'll work closely with an experienced and supportive team.
We are looking for an Engineering Manager with a strong backend engineering background to lead one of our engineering teams, combining technical depth with people leadership in a senior, product-minded team that values collaboration, impact, and continuous learning.
We're a distributed engineering team working across Europe (within +/- 1 hour of CET); topi is headquartered in Berlin. Our engineering organization is organized into small, focused teams of senior engineers. You'll lead one of these teams day-to-day: setting direction, coaching engineers, partnering with Product and Design, and being accountable for delivery.
This is a hands-on management role. We expect you to write and ship production code alongside your team, and to be deep in technical discussions, code reviews, system design conversations, and architectural decisions, especially on the backend. Your judgment shapes both how the team works and what it builds. You'll join an experienced and supportive engineering leadership team where you'll have a significant voice in shaping the organization, the engineering culture, and the product itself.
About You
This is a role for an engineering leader who has earned their stripes as an engineer and now finds their leverage in growing the people around them. You'll thrive here if you can:
- Own the Outcomes of a Team: Be accountable for what your team ships, quality, pace, and direction, without becoming the bottleneck.
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Grow Engineers: Coach a team of mostly senior engineers, set a clear bar for excellence, and create the conditions for them to do their best work.
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Bridge Product and Engineering: Partner closely with Product and Design to shape roadmaps, balance trade-offs, and turn ambiguous strategy into shipped features.
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Stay Hands-On, Especially on the Backend: Write and ship code with your team, read code fluently, ask the right questions in system design reviews, and weigh in on backend architectural decisions with credibility.
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Build a Healthy Team: Run lightweight, effective rituals (1:1s, retros, planning); give and receive honest feedback; protect focus and sustainability.
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Agentic Engineering Mindset: You treat AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, and the like) as real collaborators, not autocomplete. You own every line that ships under your name, whether you typed it or an agent did. You're motivated to deep-dive into agent workflows and bring the judgment that turns agent output into production-grade code.
To Be Successful in This Role, You'll Need:
- Engineering Experience: at least 6+ years of professional software engineering experience in a production environment, with a strong backend track record, building, scaling, and operating server-side systems and APIs in production.
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Management Experience: at least 3+ years managing engineering teams of 4 or more people, including 1:1s, performance management, hiring, and team-level delivery. Bonus if you've grown a team through a phase of scale or change.
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Technical Credibility: Hands-on production experience in Go or a comparable backend language (e.g., Java, Kotlin, C#, Rust, Scala). You have the backend fundamentals to lead technical discussions, weigh in on system design, and earn the trust of senior engineers. In line with our T-shaped fullstack culture, you're also motivated to ship code in our React/TypeScript frontend and engage in frontend discussions, even if it isn't your center of gravity.
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Coaching & Communication: A clear, direct, kind communication style. You give feedback well and receive it gracefully. You can explain complex trade-offs to engineers, product partners, and executive stakeholders.
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Operating Style: You favor clarity over process, autonomy over control, and outcomes over output. You're comfortable in a flat, senior-heavy team where authority comes from credibility, not title.
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Communication: Fluent English and the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
What we care about
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Teamwork: collaborating and supporting each other within engineering and across functions
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Inclusion: creating an environment where everybody can bring their whole self and do their best work
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Ownership: empowering you to do the work that is most impactful
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Sustainability: balancing work with family and personal hobbies so we can be at our best
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Growth: supporting each other's learning and development
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Impact from Day One - Your ideas are valued, and you actively shape our direction. No long feedback loops or complex hierarchies - you'll have a direct impact on what you do.
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Trust - We believe in our mission and in our team, offering trust-based working hours, permanent contracts, flexibility for home-country working.
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Flexibility - We offer flexible working hour arrangements to ensure a healthy work-life balance.
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Team Spirit - Shared rituals connect us, whether online or offline. We have regular formats like all-hands
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meetings, demo sessions, quizzes, and offsites - perfect opportunities to spend time as a team.
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Personal Growth - Learn from experienced colleagues and leverage the latest technologies and methodologies to succeed in your role.
topi is a Berlin-based fintech enabling businesses to access IT hardware through flexible subscription and rental models instead of upfront purchases. Our API-first platform allows retailers, manufacturers, and partners to offer hardware subscriptions seamlessly at the point of sale.
Following our acquisition by PEAC Solutions - owned by HPS / Blackrock, a global asset finance and leasing platform, topi combines fintech speed with strong financial backing and international scale. We operate across multiple European markets and focus on delivering fast, automated, and risk-aware financing solutions for SMBs.
Our mission is to make business hardware more accessible, flexible, and sustainable - supporting better cash-flow management and modern device lifecycles.
