Engineering Manager (all genders)
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Key Responsibilities

The open position is about being the engineering manager for engineers of three (small) product teams concerned with our core domain: shipping. One of the teams does not exist yet and needs to be founded in Q2/2025.

• People Development: Support engineers develop their skills by providing guidance in regular 1x1s and offering coaching and training
• Staffing: Hire best-suited engineers and make sure the teams have all the roles and skills needed to successfully nurture the development of their respective team domains
• Compensations: Negotiate salaries with engineers once a year
• Help foster a culture of continuous learning and co-intelligence throughout the engineering organization (e.g. trainings, tech talks, post-mortems, onboarding program, feedback)
• Help continuously improve the efficacy of software development practises (e.g. small iterations, testing, team programming)
• Influence the organization in making decisions that help to support a healthy engineering culture driving technical excellence
• Ensure the engineering teams are delivering high-quality code and a reliable and fast user experience and 24/7 on-call support for emergencies is available
• Help teams collaborate with other teams if necessary, help to eliminate roadblocks and clarify technical boundaries to increase team effectiveness and autonomy
• Budget responsibility within the team's area of control (e.g. personal development, cloud services)
• Ensure Security and Compliance Guidelines are followed in daily operations
• Collaborate closely with the CTO to align on the company’s strategic direction

Your Profile

• Leadership experience in Engineering Teams
• Strong coaching and facilitation skills
• Interpersonal skills, empathy, and a sense of the needs of team members, fostering an open and respectful team culture
• Profound understanding of modern cloud technologies and SaaS software architectures as well as agile methodologies and hands-on experience
• You’re used to facilitating informed decisions in engineering teams
• You’re a pragmatic mind without losing sight of the big picture
• Proficient skills in German and English (most of our engineers are native German speakers, while we have a strong need for collaboration in English due to our US teams)
• You’ll put the team first and advocate for engineering best practises such as working small and iterative, cross-functional team work, focused on solving customer problems

Nice to have

• Familiarity with most of the technologies used by Pirate Ship, especially PHP, React, and AWS (Have a look at our tech stack in our Tech Radar)
• You’ve worked in product-driven SaaS companies
• You have experience in supporting multiple teams

If you meet some, but not all, of the qualifications, we would still love to receive your application.

Our Leadership Philosophy

Our leadership philosophy is human-centric because we’re all pirates and all pirates are humans!

Pirate Ship’s mission is to level the playing field for small businesses and create the best possible user experience for our customers. We believe that a strong focus on customer value and needs is key to this mission. That’s why an important part of leadership is to inspire everyone to contribute to this vision.

Joy, clarity and fairness are firmly anchored in our overarching Pirate Code* and also form the basis for our leadership philosophy. Fun is our secret weapon. Above all, it’s through our sense of humor that we’re able to connect with people like humans.

We believe that openness, trust, respect and empathy are the basis for open collaboration, which is especially important in complex domains we’re working on. To achieve psychological safety, it is crucial to lead without blame and pursue a culture of being respectfully candid while not avoiding conflict. We all want to grow and get things right, which means we all need to continuously challenge our ways of working and change course whenever needed. This is not always easy - As a leader, it is a big part of the role to foster the culture of continuous learning by facilitating and coaching groups and individuals.

Our north star of organizational design is having enabled and self-organizing teams as much as possible, which means we support teams and individuals to be able to solve every problem in their domain. 

We believe it’s important that every pirate understands where we’re headed as an organization, to make sure we’re all sailing in the same direction. Understanding does not just mean understanding the direction but even more importantly, understanding context and background. This means going extra-lengths in explaining and persuading so that even the last landlubber can understand the problems pirates have to solve in order to be able to contribute to solutions. It is not always easy to get everyone on the same page, but we try very hard to do so. We try to include every Pirate’s perspective to make sure we get it right.

We believe every human wants to bring their best selves to work to solve hard problems and find sustainable solutions. As a leader, your job is to create a working environment that enables everyone to do so and give everyone the opportunity to shine.

We don’t lead by implementing top-down rigid processes and rather try to work on a shared understanding on what problems we want to solve and foster close collaboration to achieve the best results.

We aim for a collaborative and fast-paced environment where “Disagree & Commit” decisions are the default, but we believe that all concerns are valuable and should be heard. Often it makes it easier to make a decision if we think of it as an experiment or two-way door because there’s always room for adjustments if they turn out wrong.

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Who we aRRRre

As we are an owner-managed company - with a crisis-proof product and in a fast-growing market - we can combine our high-quality standards, our attention to detail and an attractive working environment with good conditions without contradiction.

Our agile and self-organized way of working requires a high degree of personal responsibility and independence on the one hand, but also an unconditional willingness to work as part of a team on the other.

We believe that freedom, creativity and space for your own ideas provide the ideal conditions for innovation, progress and quality. Helpfulness and trust combined with room to grow for each individual fosters the best climate for successful teams. For us, this means, among other things, that we work with as little hierarchy as possible and pull rather than push tasks.

We give each other quick feedback and don't shy away from conflict, but always find a fair and solution-oriented way forward. We learn a lot from each other on a day-to-day basis and see our diverse and colorful team as a great opportunity.

To ensure that we can work together in the long term, we do everything we can to make family and career compatible.

What doesn’t fit to us

You won't be happy with us if you expect complete and consistent processes, like in large corporations. Some things on our ship are not yet perfect, but we work together continuously and systematically on improvements. You will also be unhappy if you are a lone fighter, if you don't care, or if you expect to be told exactly what to do. And if you happen to be macho, fascist and a conspiracy theorist, you'll quickly be keelhauled!

Remote Work

Despite mandatory quarterly 3-day long on-site meetings with the whole development crew, you decide on a day-to-day basis whether you want to work remotely or on site in our pirate-themed office in Hamburg Ottensen. However, we are only looking for new pirates in Hamburg and the surrounding area, as we want to make it possible for teams to meet in the office whenever they think it makes sense.

Benefits

We haven't included a long list of the usual industry benefits here. If you'd like fruit bowls, free beer, table football or ball pools, let's have a chat. We either already have them or we can get them!

We offer the following framework conditions:

• Part-time is possible (at least 4 days a week)
• 30 days vacation
• We have a flexible working time model
• About the development environment: We mostly use MacOS, but also ARRRRrrrrch Linux and Ubuntu. We don't have Windows yet, and we don't want to support it. We work with MacBooks or ThinkPads. Most of us develop with PHPStorm, Vim or VS Code
• We offer an extensive budget of EUR 3000 per year for learning through conferences or trainings

Interested?

Send your application to [email protected]