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.