The Role
This newly created role is a rare opportunity to lead a growing team of Engineers and stay hands-on, shaping architecture decisions and contributing to full-stack design, development, testing and maintenance of our Dealerdesk product.
You’ll guide the team from concept through to deployment and ongoing support, building new features and shaping the engineering tools and processes that keep the team moving fast. Leading the team’s evolution to AI-native engineering is central to the role, changing how software is designed, written, reviewed and deployed.
Dealerdesk is built on a modern technology stack, with a single-page front-end application built in Vue.js, TypeScript and Vuetify and a back-end running on Java, Spring Boot, MySQL and Elasticsearch.
Key responsibilities
- As the Development Lead you will manage and develop a team of software engineers, conducting regular performance reviews, setting clear objectives and supporting career development plans
- Manage resourcing and workload planning across the team, balancing project priorities with team capacity
- Own technical decision-making and architecture direction for the platform, balancing scalability, quality and delivery pace and work with the Enterprise Architect to shape how AI capabilities are built into the platform over time
- Own and drive the team’s transition to AI native engineering, bringing a clear plan for how we get there from where we are today
- Introduce AI tooling into the end-to-end software development lifecycle, establishing standards, guardrails and quality controls and measuring the impact on throughput and quality
- Build confidence and capability across engineers at different starting point and evaluate emerging tooling pragmatically, deciding what we adopt, retire or avoid
- Remain hands-on with front-end and back-end development, writing clean, maintainable, and testable code
- Analyse customer requirements and translate them into technical solution concepts
- Define and lead the QA approach, performing unit and integration testing using tools such as JUnit, Mockito and Jest
- Lead regular code reviews with the wider team, upholding coding standards and quality
- Troubleshoot and debug complex issues, providing technical support and documenting solutions for future reference
- Collaborate closely with key departments, including Customer Support and Sales
- Represent the Engineering team in internal and external calls, translating between technical and business audiences to drive clear decisions and outcomes
- Contribute to the development and maintenance of comprehensive platform documentation
- Drive continuous adoption and improvement of agile development processes across the team
- Supporting the compliance and IT teams with the scoping of penetration tests and the analysis of the findings, to be fed into the product roadmap (aligned to the group remediation schedule)
- Supporting the compliance and IT teams on information security assessments, coordinating with the development team and other technical stakeholders to provide guidance on answers
- Stay up to date with emerging technologies and industry trends
Our Brand Values
- We are powered by our people
- We delight our customers
- We make it happen
- We are always learning
- We are One Team
Knowledge & Skills:
- Proven track record leading and growing high-performing software engineering teams
- Fluency in German and English (spoken and written)
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, able to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders
- Strong stakeholder management skills, comfortable influencing decisions across engineering, product and commercial teams
- Demonstrable experience of taking a software engineering team from traditional development practices to AI native ways of working, including the standards, review practices and quality controls that make it work
- Personally fluent with AI coding assistants and agents in your own engineering practice, with a realistic view of their capabilities and limitations
- Solid understanding of secure coding practices and data protection principles, with the judgement to embed these into team standards
- 8+ years of experience in full-stack software development, with strong working knowledge of at least some of the following essential technologies:
- Java, Spring Boo, MySQL, Elasticsearch, AWS, TypeScript (or a similar framework, such as Angular, React etc) Vuetify, Gitlab CI/CD and AI-assisted development tooling (for example Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or Cursor)