VP/Head of Engineering (all genders)

<br><strong>Your mission</strong><p><p style="margin-bottom:7pt;"><span style="color:#555555;">Full technical ownership of Rocket — reporting directly to the founders, with no layer in between</span></p><p style="margin-bottom:5pt;">In this role you own engineering at MICE DESK — fully. There is no CTO layer above you: architecture, technology, delivery, and team are yours, and you report directly to the founders. This is a hands-on leadership role. You lead the engineering team including our AI/Data function, own the interface to Product, and are accountable for everything that ships.</p><ul><li><strong>Engineering, end-to-end.</strong> Architecture, system design, delivery against the roadmap, reliability, technical debt. Backend, frontend, DevOps, QA, and the AI/Data team all roll up to you. You set lightweight processes that let a small team ship fast without breaking things.</li><li><strong>An AI-enabled engineering pipeline.</strong> We don't just build AI products — we build with AI. You make the engineering organization itself AI-native: agentic coding workflows, AI-assisted review and testing, automation of everything repetitive. A small team should ship like one three times its size — making that true is your job.</li><li><strong>AI as a core system capability.</strong> You architect the integration of LLMs and agentic workflows into production systems: deterministic logic combined with AI-generated outputs, with real validation, fallbacks, and reliability strategies. Hotel operations run on our platform — non-determinism is no excuse for unreliability.</li><li><strong>The team.</strong> Hire, mentor, scale. You inherit a strong small team and grow it into a high-performance engineering organization with a culture of ownership and speed. Our distributed hiring strategy across multiple locations is yours as well.</li><li><strong>Product and business alignment.</strong> You work directly with the founders and Product. You challenge requirements, simplify complexity, and connect engineering work to outcomes: revenue, automation, customer impact. As we enter the US market, engineering has to keep pace with enterprise-scale customers on two continents.</li></ul><p style="margin-top:7pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:4pt;margin-left:0cm;"><strong>What success looks like:</strong></p><ul><li><strong>6 months:</strong> Delivery is predictable, the AI-enabled dev pipeline is running, and the team has grown with A-players you hired.</li><li><strong>12 months:</strong> The platform scales with US enterprise customers, core systems are reliable and observable, and engineering is a competitive advantage — not a bottleneck.</li></ul><p style="margin-top:7pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:5pt;margin-left:0cm;border:none;padding:0cm;"><strong>Honestly: </strong>This is full accountability with no net above it. No CTO layer to make or catch decisions — the architecture, the team, and everything that ships are yours. If you want a role where someone above you sets direction, this isn't it. If you want exactly that ownership, it is.</p></p><br><strong>Your profile</strong><p><ul><li>10+ years of software engineering, 5+ in an engineering leadership role at high-growth product companies.</li><li>Strong hands-on backend or full-stack background — you can still go deep.</li><li>Proven experience scaling engineering teams at growing startups.</li><li>Strong architecture expertise: APIs, distributed systems, event-driven design, cloud.</li><li>LLM / agentic AI systems in production — and genuine conviction that engineering itself should be AI-assisted.</li><li>Product mindset: you connect technical decisions to business outcomes.</li><li>Comfortable with ambiguity, speed, and full accountability.</li></ul><p style="margin-top:7pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:5pt;margin-left:0cm;border:none;padding:0cm;"><strong>Nice to have, not required: </strong>Background in hospitality tech, CRM, PMS, or revenue management. Enterprise integration experience (Salesforce, Oracle OPERA Cloud, Microsoft Graph API). Experience leading distributed, international teams.</p></p><br><strong>Why us?</strong><p><span style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;color:rgb(66,66,66);font-size:14px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;text-transform:none;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);">We are the technology company rethinking group and event sales in hospitality. What runs today through inboxes, spreadsheets and phone calls, our platform Rocket turns into one continuous, AI-supported process — from the first enquiry to the signed contract. European hotel groups already run their group sales on it.<br style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;">What that means for you: you work with AI, not despite it. People who join us give feedback that shapes product decisions — and sooner or later come to understand why one prompt works better than another.<br style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;">And because we are growing fast, a lot here is still taking shape. Sometimes the honest answer is “we’re still building that.” That is exactly where the opportunity lies: you will find open space rather than finished structures, and what you build here will carry your signature.<br style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;"></span><span style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:14px;">What we offer</span><ul style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif, Inter, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;margin:8px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 24px;color:rgb(66,66,66);font-size:14px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;text-transform:none;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:disc;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;"><strong style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;font-weight:600;">Work with real AI technology</strong> at international level — not as a pilot project, but as our business model.</li><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:disc;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;"><strong style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;font-weight:600;">Genuine room to shape things.</strong> Your ideas do not land in a suggestion box; they land in the next iteration.</li><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:disc;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;"><strong style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;font-weight:600;">A short path to the management team.</strong> Decisions take days, not committee rounds.</li><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:disc;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;"><strong style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;font-weight:600;">Growth you are part of.</strong> We are building the company’s next chapter — with roles, responsibility and prospects that did not exist a year ago.</li><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:disc;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;"><strong style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;font-weight:600;">Leipzig as your primary base</strong>, with regular time in the office and flexible remote work. Hybrid models are everyday practice here, not the exception.</li><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:disc;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;"><strong style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;font-weight:600;">Permanent contract, full-time.</strong></li><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:disc;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;"><strong style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;font-weight:600;">Performance bonuses</strong> for demonstrable results.</li><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:disc;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;"><strong style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;font-weight:600;">Multi-day team events</strong> in places that are actually fun.</li></ul><span style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:14px;">Our hiring process</span><ol style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif, Inter, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;margin:8px 0px 8px 26px;padding:0px 0px 0px 24px;color:rgb(66,66,66);font-size:14px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;text-transform:none;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:decimal;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;"><strong style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;font-weight:600;">Intro interview</strong> — we get to know each other, and you learn where we stand and where we are heading.</li><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:decimal;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;"><strong style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:inherit;font-weight:600;">Leadership study or technical study</strong>, depending on the role — a real problem from our day-to-day that we work through together.</li><li style="border:0px solid rgb(229,231,235);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;list-style-type:decimal;margin-bottom:4px;font-size:14px;font-weight:bold;"><strong>Founder interview</strong></li></ol></p><p>Find more <a href="https://www.arbeitnow.com/english-speaking-jobs">English Speaking Jobs in Germany</a> on Arbeitnow</a>