Manager Engineering (d/f/m)

DEPT

HEAD OF ENGINEERING (D/F/M) Hamburg, hybrid DEPT® is a Growth Invention company built to help the world’s most ambitious brands grow faster. Operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, our 4,000+ specialists deliver growth invention services across Brand & Media, Experience, Commerce, CRM, and Technology & Data. We’re 50|50 tech and marketing, partner-led, and first to move. Clients include Google, Lufthansa, Meta, eBay, and OpenAI. We have been certified B Corp and Climate Neutral since 2021. JOB PURPOSE This role is part of our Experience & Engineering team in Germany. We combine technology and experience design to create emotive yet conversion-focused ideas, products, and campaigns at scale and speed. Our specialty is digital experiences and communication that change perceptions and shape new behaviours to make a difference in the market. In this key leadership position, you are responsible for the strategic direction and growth of our Engineering teams. You will lead a team of approximately 7-9 professionals, including Team Leads and Senior Engineers. Your focus shifts from writing code to building systems: you will optimize processes, develop the next generation of leaders, and actively drive the cultural change toward AI-driven development. WHAT YOU’LL DO: * Leadership of Leaders: You lead, coach, and mentor Team Leads and Senior Engineers. You own their career paths and empower them to lead their own sub-teams to excellence. * AI Change Management: You define the roadmap for integrating Artificial Intelligence into the daily engineering lifecycle (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Agentic Workflows). You act as a change agent, transforming our workflows for maximum efficiency and innovation. * Operational Excellence: You take full ownership of your department's operational performance (resource planning, budget monitoring, utilization) and ensure a profitable and scalable engineering organization. * Strategic Partnering: You work closely with Directors and VPs to sharpen DEPT®’s technological vision in the DACH region and act as a high-level technical sparring partner for our key accounts. * Cultural Stewardship: You foster an inclusive, motivating, high-performance culture and establish modern department rituals that promote knowledge sharing and innovation. WHAT YOU BRING: * Proven People Manager: You have a track record of leading teams in a "manager-of-managers" structure or significant experience leading larger engineering departments. * Change Agent: You are passionate about the potential of AI in the software lifecycle and have a clear vision of how modern engineering organizations must evolve. * Frontend Background: You possess a deep technical history in frontend development, allowing you to validate architectural decisions and act as a mentor on eye-level. * Business Acumen: You understand the economic drivers of an agency or consultancy and can translate KPIs into actionable success. * Communication: You are a confident communicator in both German and English, able to present complex technical topics to both stakeholders and clients. WE OFFER: * Flexible, hybrid working policy (1-2 days at the office, depending on location); * Company pension scheme. * Lease bike options / JobRad and 25% subsidy for the Deutschlandticket. * Occasional breakfast/lunch at the office, Smoothie Tuesdays. * Stay happy and healthy with a contribution to your health through the OpenUp platform; * €50 personal monthly allowance via our dedicated benefits apps for use across daily expenses and lifestyle perks. * Future Bens - Exclusive access to sustainable, healthy products at attractive deals. * Social events, plenty of opportunities to connect with colleagues through organised activities and celebrations. * A reputation for doing good. DEPT® has been a Certified B Corp® since 2021 and named ‘Agency of the Year’ at both The Lovies and The Webby Awards. * Awesome clients. Whether big or small, local or global — at DEPT® you’ll get the opportunity to work with clients of all sizes and across all industries. And we celebrate all of our successes together! * The opportunity for possibility. We want to enable you to do what you do best and help you develop your skills further with training, development and certifications. * Global annual DEPT® Cares Month in which employees come together and donate their skills to support local charities. WHY DEPT®? We are a Growth Invention company built to help the world’s most ambitious brands grow faster. Operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, we create what is next by pioneering ideas, acting fast, and moving further because standing still just is not in our DNA. We are drawn to people who stay curious, move with intent, and never stop inventing. Our culture runs on three values: better together, relentlessly curious, and get sh*t done. It is how we work, how we grow, and how we make things that matter. At DEPT®, you will find the freedom to explore, the space to collaborate, and the trust to make a real impact for our clients, for each other, and for the world we are helping to build. DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION  At DEPT®, we take pride in creating an inclusive workplace where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive. We actively seek to recruit, develop, nurture, and retain talented individuals from diverse backgrounds, with varying skills and perspectives. Not sure you meet all qualifications? Apply, and let us decide! Research shows that women and members of underrepresented groups tend not to apply for jobs when they think they may not meet every requirement, when in fact they do. We believe in giving everyone a fair chance to shine. We also encourage you to reach out to us and discuss any reasonable adjustments we can make to support you throughout the recruitment process and your time with us. Want to know more about our dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion? Check out our efforts here.

DEPT

LEAD ENGINEER (D/F/M) Hamburg, hybrid DEPT® is a Growth Invention company built to help the world’s most ambitious brands grow faster. Operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, our 4,000+ specialists deliver growth invention services across Brand & Media, Experience, Commerce, CRM, and Technology & Data. We’re 50|50 tech and marketing, partner-led, and first to move. Clients include Google, Lufthansa, Meta, eBay, and OpenAI. We have been certified B Corp and Climate Neutral since 2021. JOB PURPOSE This role is part of our Experience & Engineering team in Germany. We combine technology and experience design to create emotive yet conversion-focused ideas, products, and campaigns at scale and speed. Our specialty is digital experiences and communication that change perceptions and shape new behaviours to make a difference in the market. In this key leadership position, you are responsible for the strategic direction and growth of our Engineering teams. You will lead a team of approximately 7-9 professionals, including Team Leads and Senior Engineers. Your focus shifts from writing code to building systems: you will optimize processes, develop the next generation of leaders, and actively drive the cultural change toward AI-driven development. WHAT YOU’LL DO: * Leadership of Leaders: You lead, coach, and mentor Team Leads and Senior Engineers. You own their career paths and empower them to lead their own sub-teams to excellence. * AI Change Management: You define the roadmap for integrating Artificial Intelligence into the daily engineering lifecycle (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Agentic Workflows). You act as a change agent, transforming our workflows for maximum efficiency and innovation. * Operational Excellence: You take full ownership of your department's operational performance (resource planning, budget monitoring, utilization) and ensure a profitable and scalable engineering organization. * Strategic Partnering: You work closely with Directors and VPs to sharpen DEPT®’s technological vision in the DACH region and act as a high-level technical sparring partner for our key accounts. * Cultural Stewardship: You foster an inclusive, motivating, high-performance culture and establish modern department rituals that promote knowledge sharing and innovation. WHAT YOU BRING: * Proven People Manager: You have a track record of leading teams in a "manager-of-managers" structure or significant experience leading larger engineering departments. * Change Agent: You are passionate about the potential of AI in the software lifecycle and have a clear vision of how modern engineering organizations must evolve. * Frontend Background: You possess a deep technical history in frontend development, allowing you to validate architectural decisions and act as a mentor on eye-level. * Business Acumen: You understand the economic drivers of an agency or consultancy and can translate KPIs into actionable success. * Communication: You are a confident communicator in both German and English, able to present complex technical topics to both stakeholders and clients. WE OFFER: * Flexible, hybrid working policy (1-2 days at the office, depending on location); * Company pension scheme. * Lease bike options / JobRad and 25% subsidy for the Deutschlandticket. * Occasional breakfast/lunch at the office, Smoothie Tuesdays. * Stay happy and healthy with a contribution to your health through the OpenUp platform; * €50 personal monthly allowance via our dedicated benefits apps for use across daily expenses and lifestyle perks. * Future Bens - Exclusive access to sustainable, healthy products at attractive deals. * Social events, plenty of opportunities to connect with colleagues through organised activities and celebrations. * A reputation for doing good. DEPT® has been a Certified B Corp® since 2021 and named ‘Agency of the Year’ at both The Lovies and The Webby Awards. * Awesome clients. Whether big or small, local or global — at DEPT® you’ll get the opportunity to work with clients of all sizes and across all industries. And we celebrate all of our successes together! * The opportunity for possibility. We want to enable you to do what you do best and help you develop your skills further with training, development and certifications. * Global annual DEPT® Cares Month in which employees come together and donate their skills to support local charities. WHY DEPT®? We are a Growth Invention company built to help the world’s most ambitious brands grow faster. Operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, we create what is next by pioneering ideas, acting fast, and moving further because standing still just is not in our DNA. We are drawn to people who stay curious, move with intent, and never stop inventing. Our culture runs on three values: better together, relentlessly curious, and get sh*t done. It is how we work, how we grow, and how we make things that matter. At DEPT®, you will find the freedom to explore, the space to collaborate, and the trust to make a real impact for our clients, for each other, and for the world we are helping to build. DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION  At DEPT®, we take pride in creating an inclusive workplace where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive. We actively seek to recruit, develop, nurture, and retain talented individuals from diverse backgrounds, with varying skills and perspectives. Not sure you meet all qualifications? Apply, and let us decide! Research shows that women and members of underrepresented groups tend not to apply for jobs when they think they may not meet every requirement, when in fact they do. We believe in giving everyone a fair chance to shine. We also encourage you to reach out to us and discuss any reasonable adjustments we can make to support you throughout the recruitment process and your time with us. Want to know more about our dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion? Check out our efforts here.

FREENOW

Location: Come and join us in Hamburg or Berlin! Following Lyft’s acquisition of Freenow, we are looking for a Senior TPM to lead the technical workstreams that get us to Day 1 readiness — the period between signing and closing — and to set up the integration that follows. This is a high-stakes, high-visibility role reporting into the EU Tech Leader, with direct exposure to Freenow and Lyft leadership. You will be the single point of accountability for technical Day 1 readiness. That means making sure every employee, every office, and every critical system is ready to operate underFreenow by Lyft from the moment the deal closes — and that the integration stream is up and running the day after. You will also be the TPM accountable for the integration of future acquisitions Freenow makes. This is not a role for someone who wants to administer a project plan. You are expected to be technically credible, opinionated, and comfortable holding senior people to account across IT, Security, Infrastructure, Engineering, Legal, People, and Finance. You make decisions when others stall, escalate cleanly when you can’t, and keep the whole machine moving. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- YOUR DAILY ADVENTURES WILL INCLUDE: * Day 1 readiness. Own the end-to-end technical readiness plan between signing and closing. Define what “ready” means, track every workstream against it, and call the go/no-go on technical readiness for Day 1. * IT and workplace cutover. Coordinate identity and system access (SSO, IdP, mail, productivity suite, engineering tooling), hardware provisioning and re-imaging, and office setup including network, VPN, Wi-Fi, meeting rooms, and physical access. Make sure nobody shows up on Day 1 unable to work. * Security and compliance posture. Partner with Security and Legal to make sure the technical environment meets the new shareholder’s requirements on Day 1 — access controls, data handling, audit trails, vendor relationships. * Integration stream kickoff. Stand up the technical integration workstreams between Freenow and Lyft so they are running, staffed, and producing output from day one of the integration phase. Set the operating cadence, dependencies, and escalation paths. * Cross-functional orchestration. Hold IT, SRE, Infrastructure, Platform, Product Engineering, Data, Security, People, Legal, and Finance together on a single plan. Push hard on dependencies. Surface risks before they become incidents. * Executive communication. Produce the technical readiness narrative for Freenow leadership, Lyft leadership, and the integration steering committee. Honest, concise, decision-oriented. * Future M&A. Codify what you learn into a repeatable M&A integration playbook so we can do this faster and better the next time Freenow acquires a company. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE: * Significant TPM, engineering management, or M&A integration experience, with a clear track record of delivering on M&A separation, integration, or carve-out programmes — ideally including a Day 1 cutover under a new owner. * A strong technical foundation — software engineering or infrastructure background. You can sit in an architecture review and push back credibly, and you understand what it takes to operate large-scale, 24x7 production systems. * Working knowledge of enterprise IT and corporate engineering: identity providers and SSO, MDM, endpoint management, networking and VPN, SaaS provisioning, source control and CI/CD tooling, cloud account structures. * Comfort operating in extreme ambiguity with only high-level direction, across multiple jurisdictions, time zones, and corporate cultures. * Excellent written and verbal communication in English. You can brief a C-level audience in three slides and an engineer in a Slack thread, and adjust the register without losing precision. * Influence without authority. You get senior people to commit, deliver, and stay aligned in a matrixed environment — without needing a reporting line to do it. * Calm under pressure. M&A timelines move, regulators ask questions, and things break. You stay structured and keep others structured. Nice to have:  * Previous experience inside a regulated business (mobility, fintech, payments) or working through a change-of-control event. * Familiarity with the German labour and works council context. * Exposure to both acquirer-side and target-side integration work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BENEFITS & PERKS IN A NUTSHELL: * Flexible working arrangements * LinkedIn Learning * Sabbatical & special leave policies * WeRoad partnership * Birthday, 24th + 31st December off * Short term EU work policy * Mobility Credit * Health Insurance * Employee assistance program     ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION: Freenow is an equal opportunity employer and we consider qualified applicants regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or age. We want you to grow and evolve, bring your true self to work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT US: Freenow by Lyft empowers smarter mobility decisions, helping people to move freely and cities to thrive. Through our multi-mobility app, we feature broad options for everyone across 9 European markets and over 180 cities. Millions of passengers can access services including taxis, private hire vehicles, carsharing, car rental, e-scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds, and public transport within a single app.  In July 2025 Freenow was acquired by Lyft, a global mobility platform, which connects riders and drivers for billions of rides across North America and Europe. Together, Freenow and Lyft are creating a more caring and connected world, with transportation for everyone. We are a global, diverse, highly motivated, and collaborative team that strives for excellence and likes to have fun. Ready for your next ride? SEE WHAT OUR AWESOME COLLEAGUES SAY ABOUT US                 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------