Head of Engineering (m/f/d)

ecoplanet builds the operating system for the energy transition. Our software helps European businesses cut energy costs, run more efficiently, and take the pain out of managing energy day to day. We are around 40 people and backed by EQT Ventures, HV Capital and others.

You lead engineering at ecoplanet: 11 engineers in two squads, including two squad leads.

This is the most senior engineering role in the company. There is no CTO above you. You own the technical direction, not just the delivery of someone else's plan, and you are the engineering voice on the leadership team.

It is also a hands-on job. With a team this size you stay close to the code and the architecture. If you have been away from technical work for a few years, this might not be the right role for you.

What you will own:

• The team. 11 engineers, which includes two engineering managers. Hiring, performance, growth, and keeping good people
• The systems. Our Cockpit SaaS platform, the metering and IoT integration layer, the data platform (time-series ingestion, quality, pipelines), the forecasting and optimization services, and the automation that acts on customer assets
• The technical direction. Architecture, build-vs-buy, and the big platform calls
• Delivery. Quarterly roadmap execution, owned together with Product
• Operations. Reliability, on-call, incidents, security posture, and cloud spend

• Get the best out of the team you have and grow only where it clearly adds. At 11 people, losing one strong engineer costs more than one extra hire gains. But you should be capable of growing the team substantially if business demands it
• Turn the roadmap into commitments the company can count on. Surface dependencies early, clear blockers, and make the trade-off calls with Product and the founders.
• We expect engineering to care about business and product and we expect you to be an example here
• Set the architecture so it holds as data volume, customer count and the team grow.
• Run incidents properly: fast response, honest postmortems, fixes that stop the same thing happening again
• Keep enough processes to be reliable and no more. A 11-person team should not feel like a 100-person one
• Work closely with Product, Data Science, our energy market experts and other disciplines, so we build against the real physical and regulatory constraints

Must have

• 3+ years of experience leading engineering teams before in a product company, including senior engineers or squad leads
• You have done it in a lean team, hands-on, without a layer of managers to delegate to. Some excellent large-company leaders struggle here. There is no layer to hide behind
• You have personally owned delivery predictability and reliability for a production system real customers depend on, and you can tell us what it looked like before and after
• Strong technical judgment in at least two of: cloud and distributed backend / multi-tenant SaaS; high-volume or time-series data pipelines; IoT, device integration and real-time telemetry; ML or optimization in production. Deep enough to earn engineers' trust, make architecture calls and set the technical direction yourself
• You have run hiring and performance for real: you have grown people, and you have also managed people out when that was the right call
• You treat incident management, security and compliance as yours to own, not to delegate
• Clear written and spoken English. German is a strong plus — most of our customers are German Mittelstand

• Energy, industrial, SaaS or a physical-world domain.
• Having been the most senior technical person somewhere before (CTO, VP Engineering, or the person everyone asked).

• Being the strongest coder on the team. You do need to read the code, make architecture calls, and occasionally build something.
• A “Head of” title already. We look at what you have done, not what it was called.

• Top-of-market team, flat hierarchy — work alongside people who push you to get better
• Competitive salary
• Full ownership from day one — you actively shape our company
• Central office, easy commute — free lunch every Tuesday and Thursday
• Wellpass membership
• Regular 1:1s and retros focused on your growth
• Real impact — your work supports Europe's transition to a smarter energy system

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