Head of Engineering (m/f/d)

About ecoplanet

ecoplanet develops a comprehensive operating system facilitating the energy transition. Their platform aids European companies in reducing energy expenses, enhancing operational efficiency, and simplifying day-to-day energy management. Supported by prominent investors and a team of approximately 40 individuals, the company is headquartered in Munich, Germany.

Role Overview

The Head of Engineering leads a team of 11 engineers organized into two squads, managing technical direction and engineering operations without a CTO above. This role demands active technical engagement with the codebase and architecture, ensuring strong leadership and hands-on involvement in all technical aspects.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage and nurture an 11-person engineering team, including two engineering managers—handling hiring, performance, growth, and retention.
• Oversee systems including the Cockpit SaaS platform, metering and IoT integration layers, data platform for time-series ingestion and quality, forecasting and optimization services, and automation controlling customer assets.
• Determine the technical roadmap, architecture, build-versus-buy decisions, and major platform strategies.
• Collaborate closely with Product to execute quarterly roadmaps and ensure timely delivery.
• Maintain operational reliability covering incident response, on-call management, security posture, and cloud cost management.

What Success Looks Like

• Maximize team strengths with careful growth decisions, avoiding high turnover impact while scaling as business demands.
• Convert strategic roadmaps into reliable deliverables by proactively surfacing dependencies and managing blockers.
• Promote an engineering culture deeply aligned with business and product objectives, serving as a leading example.
• Architect systems that sustain scalability with increasing data volumes, customer base, and team size.
• Implement robust incident handling with swift responses, transparent postmortems, and long-term corrective actions.
• Apply minimal yet effective processes that support a lean team without unnecessary overhead.
• Work cross-functionally with Product, Data Science, energy market specialists, and others to align development with real-world physical and regulatory requirements.

Required Qualifications

• Minimum 3 years of prior experience leading engineering teams within product-focused companies, including managing senior engineers or squad leads.
• Proven hands-on leadership in lean teams without intermediate management layers.
• Direct responsibility for delivering reliable, predictable production systems supporting real customers, with demonstrable improvements documented.
• Strong technical expertise in at least two areas: cloud and distributed backend/multi-tenant SaaS, high-volume/time-series data pipelines, IoT and real-time telemetry integration, or ML/optimization in production.
• Experience in recruiting, developing talent, and managing personnel decisions, including performance improvement or exits.
• Ownership of incident management, security, and compliance responsibilities without delegation.
• Fluent in English (written and verbal); proficiency in German is highly beneficial due to client demographics.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in energy, industrial, SaaS, or related physical-world domains.
• Previous experience as the senior-most technical leader (CTO, VP Engineering, or equivalent).

Not Mandatory

• Being the top coder; however, technical acumen to read code, make architectural decisions, and occasionally write code is necessary.
• Formal "Head of" title; focus is on demonstrated capabilities, not job titles.

What ecoplanet Offers

• Collaborative, top-tier team with a flat organizational structure encouraging mutual improvement.
• Competitive compensation package.
• Full ownership and influence over technical and company direction from day one.
• Central Munich office with convenient commute options and complimentary lunches twice weekly.
• Wellpass membership for wellness and fitness benefits.
• Regular one-on-one meetings and retrospectives aimed at personal growth.
• Opportunity to contribute significantly to Europe's smarter energy transition.