Product Engineering Lead

November 6, 2026

Remote

Lead

München, Germany

Indeed

Description

Remote engineering leadership role for a European security-compliance SaaS scaling from 8 to 16 engineers. The hire starts hands-on in the codebase, shipping features with AI, then takes over technical decisions, quality, hiring and eventually team management. The stack centres on Java (Spring Boot/Hibernate), relational databases and heavy AI-assisted development with Cursor and Claude Code. Success is measured by cycle time, zero-bugs and a hiring process that runs independently.

Responsibilities

Ship a meaningful feature with AI alongside the team in the first month
Find where features take three weeks that should take one and fix it in tooling, review, testing or task allocation
Take over technical interviews and build a hiring process that runs without founder oversight
Own technical decisions: how engineers test, review code and security, how the team is organised and who is hired next
Refine software development processes and own cycle time from spec to production
Improve how engineers test and automate and how they review each other's code and security changes
Run technical interviews and mentoring, then 1:1s and growth conversations as the team grows
Keep pushing the AI playbook for both engineering craft and management work
Lead 2–3 major projects from spec to production within six months
Own specs, architecture and reviews on the biggest projects while shipping every week

Requirements

8+ years as a software engineer at senior or staff level, including 1+ years as tech lead for a team of 3+
Shipped AI features to production — retrieval, RAG, agentic workflows — and knows what holds up on real customer data
Product taste: a keen sense for what makes a product feel great and the habit of saying so when it doesn't
Built and shipped with Claude Code and Cursor in real production work
Leads system design: writes the spec, owns the architecture and drives it to production
Strong OOP fundamentals; Java Spring Boot, Hibernate or equivalent
Relational database design and SQL optimisation
Experience interviewing engineering candidates
Built something from zero to one at a startup or scaled a team through the messy middle
Able to work in European timezone (CET/CEST); EMEA-based, ideally Germany or UK
Some people management and technical interviewing experience (nice to have)
Designed a technical interview process from scratch (nice to have)
Previous experience at a fully remote company (nice to have)