Engineering Manager - Pre-ordering (m/f/d)

Company Description

Flink is the leading quick commerce player in Europe. We are on a mission to give people back time: You can order your groceries through our app and we deliver to your doorstep in minutes. We carry 3,000 products with a focus on the leading brands in each category. We aim for sustainability by making deliveries on electric bikes and utilizing recyclable packaging. 

Flink launched in February 2021 and already operates in more than 90 cities in Germany, and the Netherlands. The business generated more than EUR 400m in revenues in 2024 and is operationally profitable. Flink is backed by the world’s most renowned tech investors, including Prosus, Mubadala, and Bond, and strategic investors like Doordash and REWE. We take great pride in being an inclusive employer that offers equal opportunities, and we celebrate the diversity and multiculturalism of our team. We're growing fast and always pushing ourselves to do better - we play for #1.

The Pre-Ordering team is the front door of Flink: the first thing millions of customers see and touch. Every visit starts in the screens and services this team builds, from signing up and logging in to the home screen, search, categories and deals. We are looking for an experienced and passionate Engineering Manager (m/f/d) to lead this team and help customers quickly find what they came for, discover new favourites, and keep coming back.

Job Description

As the Engineering Manager for Pre-Ordering, you'll play a vital role in Flink's success. You'll lead a cross-functional team that delivers end-to-end across backend, web, iOS and Android, working closely with Design and Analytics. We believe in full cross-functional teams with complete service ownership: your team owns the problem, the solution and the outcome.

Your scope covers everything a customer does before checkout: onboarding new customers, login and authentication, the user profile, Flink Prime (our subscription programme), the Explore page, search, category navigation, deals, our in-house recommender, and integrations with third-party systems. Your decisions directly affect how easily millions of customers find their groceries, how often they come back, and how well we can offer retail media to brands, an important part of Flink's revenue.

• Lead & Grow Engineers: Build a high-trust environment where engineers thrive and take ownership. You own end-to-end hiring, onboarding, and performance management, accountable for building and continuously improving how we attract talent. Ensure every team member has a clear career path and receives regular, actionable feedback. Help your team get 1% better every day.
• Drive Product & Business Impact: Partner with Product, Design, and Analytics to shape initiatives that directly impact Flink's revenue and customer experience. You'll work on challenges like improving search relevance, personalising the Explore page, making sign-up and login effortless across devices, making Flink Prime more valuable to subscribers, and creating new retail media placements without hurting the shopping experience.
• Own Critical Systems: Your team owns the systems that present our catalog to customers: the services behind the home screen, search, categories and product pages, our recommender, customer accounts and authentication, Prime subscriptions, and integrations with third-party systems. The Pricing team sets prices and promotions; your team decides how customers see them. Every session in our apps runs through these systems.
• Guide Technical Direction: Shape the technology strategy for Pre-Ordering, including how we grow server-driven UI so changes reach iOS, Android and web without waiting for an app release. Ensure your team makes the right technical decisions to deliver high-quality solutions reliably and repeatedly. You'll be included in architectural discussions, RFCs, and trade-off decisions, championing reliability, observability, and pragmatic engineering.
• Champion Operational Excellence: Set the bar for how your systems run in production. Your team owns SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, alerting and incident response for login, home, search and product pages. You'll lead blameless postmortems that drive continuous improvement.
• Reduce Toil & Accelerate Delivery: You'll have the space and support to invest in what matters: automating tests, reducing operational overhead, simplifying system complexity, and building self-service capabilities. We believe sustainable velocity comes from investing in engineering health, not just shipping features.
• Work in Focused Builds: We work in short, focused builds with clear scope and a fixed time box, in a setup similar to Shape Up. Our process is still young, and you'll help us shape how it works.
• Embrace Agentic Development: We work with coding agents such as Claude Code every day, for writing, testing, reviewing and porting code between platforms. You'll help your team use them well and keep improving the agent instructions and skills in our repositories.
• Foster a Strong Engineering Culture: Create an environment where the best idea wins, encouraging constructive debate followed by committed execution. Embody "never let another Flinker fail" by supporting your team and celebrating wins together.
• Make Security Part of the Work: Security is not an afterthought. We take it seriously, and you'll help your team make the right trade-offs between shipping product and keeping quality high.
• Partner Across Flink: We believe in close collaboration with our stakeholders. You'll work closely with peer Engineering Managers and with teams such as Retail Media, Commercial, Marketing and Operations, translating technical constraints into clear business context.

Qualifications

We're looking for a leader who is passionate about building robust systems and even stronger teams. You thrive in a fast-paced environment and are excited by the challenge of solving complex problems at scale.

• People leadership experience: Demonstrated experience building psychological safety, coaching engineers, and providing direct, compassionate feedback. You have a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineering teams.
• Strong technical foundation: Solid knowledge of backend systems, microservices, and how they serve mobile and web clients. You can engage meaningfully in architectural discussions and guide your team toward good trade-offs.
• Reliability mindset: Experience running high-reliability services with SLIs/SLOs, observability, and incident management practices.
• Communication skills: Ability to translate complex technical challenges into clear business impact for diverse stakeholders.

Nice to Have

• Experience with consumer e-commerce products such as home screens, search, onboarding or subscriptions, using experiments and data to decide what to build
• Experience with agentic development: using coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, and helping a team adopt them
• Search, recommendation or personalisation systems, including working with Data Science
• Retail media or ad tech
• Identity and authentication, and handling personal data under GDPR
• Building agentic customer experiences, such as AI assistants or MCP. This is an area we expect to grow into.
• Familiarity with marketplaces or quick commerce

Additional Information

• Remote-friendly culture with at least 1 day per week in our Berlin HQ
• €1000 annual L&D budget as well as individual coaching options to ensure you have plenty of opportunities to learn, grow and achieve your goals
• 26 days of vacation, +1 day every year up to a maximum of 30 days
• Mobility budget of 35 EUR per month for Deutschland Ticket subsidy
• Discount on your Urban Sports Club membership
• Attractive company pension options
• Unlimited access to an e-learning and development platform, MyAcademy, including online German courses
• Online discounts with Corporate Benefits and Future Bens
• Cool discount off your personal Flink orders; be the first to test out new products!
• Modern and dog-friendly office in the heart of Berlin - lots of delicious lunch spots available within short walking distance

It is our commitment that every applicant will be evaluated according to their skills regardless of age, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability status, or religion.