We're looking for a hands-on Engineering Team Lead to lead our product engineering team and drive technical excellence across our e-commerce platform. You'll manage a team of 2 engineers while remaining deeply involved in code — architecting solutions, reviewing pull requests, and shipping production features yourself.

This is a player-coach role: you'll spend roughly 50% of your time coding and 50% leading. You'll establish engineering standards, organize sprints, manage our cloud infrastructure, and ensure we deliver bug-free, high-quality software. You'll also pioneer AI-augmented development workflows, integrating tools like Claude Code into our daily engineering practices to maximize team velocity and code quality.

You'll report directly to the CTO and play a critical role in scaling our Shopify-integrated platform, improving system reliability, and building a high-performance engineering culture.

Aufgaben

Technical Leadership

• Hands-On Development: Actively contribute to the codebase — write production code, build features, and fix critical bugs alongside your team.
• Architecture & Code Quality: Design and implement clean, maintainable, and scalable solutions using TypeScript and React, following modern best practices.
• Code Reviews: Conduct thorough PR reviews to ensure code quality, security, and adherence to engineering standards.
• Quality Ownership: Take responsibility for bug-free software delivery through robust testing strategies, code review processes, and quality gates.

Team Management

• Lead & Mentor: Manage, mentor, and grow a team of 2 engineers — provide technical guidance, conduct 1:1s, and support career development.
• Sprint Organization: Plan and run sprints, manage backlog prioritization, and ensure timely delivery of initiatives.
• Engineering Guidelines: Establish and document coding standards, PR review guidelines, testing requirements, and development workflows.

Infrastructure & DevOps

• Infrastructure Management: Own and manage cloud infrastructure (Google Cloud), including deployment pipelines, monitoring, and system reliability.
• CI/CD Excellence: Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines for automated testing, linting, and deployment.
• Monitoring & Reliability: Implement alerting, logging, and observability to ensure production stability and fast incident response.

AI-Augmented Engineering

• AI Workflow Integration: Lead the adoption of AI coding assistants (Claude Code) into engineering workflows.
• Prompt Engineering: Develop effective prompts, agents, skills, MCPs, configurations, and AI-assisted development patterns for the team.
• Productivity Innovation: Stay current with AI engineering practices (you know already what is Boris Cherny's workflow) and continuously improve team velocity through AI tooling.

Collaboration

• Cross-Functional Partnership: Work closely with Product, Design, Data, and Customer Success teams to deliver customer-focused solutions.
• Shopify Integration: Ensure seamless integration with Shopify APIs, storefronts, and e-commerce systems.
• Technical Communication: Translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and represent engineering in strategic discussions.

Qualifikation

Experience

• 8+ years of professional software development experience
• 3+ years in engineering leadership roles (Team Lead, Tech Lead, or Engineering Manager)
• Proven track record of managing and mentoring engineers
• Experience building and scaling platforms (e-commerce / Shopify experience a plus)

Technical Expertise

Strong Knowledge of:

• TypeScript and modern JavaScript (ES6+)
• React / React Native core concepts (Hooks, Context API, State Management)
• Node.js backend development
• REST and GraphQL APIs
• Shopify APIs (Storefront, Admin, Hydrogen) — preferred
• Checkout integrations

Infrastructure & DevOps:

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — compute, storage, networking
• CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Fastlane, Bitrise, or similar)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) — preferred
• Monitoring and observability (Sentry, Grafana, or similar)
• Container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes basics)

Quality & Testing:

• Unit testing (Jest, Vitest)
• E2E testing (Playwright, Detox, Cypress)
• Code review best practices
• Git workflows (trunk-based development, feature branches)

AI Engineering Experience

• Required: Hands-on experience integrating AI coding assistants into development workflows
• Preferred: Experience with Claude Code, agentic coding workflows, or similar AI-augmented development practices
• Familiarity with prompt & agentic engineering and AI-assisted code review
• Enthusiasm for exploring and adopting emerging AI development tools

Bonus Skills

• Experience with Shopify Hydrogen, Remix, or headless commerce
• Experience with analytics platforms, A/B testing, or personalization systems
• Background in subscription/recurring billing systems
• Experience within the small teams and in scale ups

Soft Skills

• Leadership: Ability to inspire, motivate, and develop engineers while maintaining high standards
• Communication: Clear and effective communicator — can explain technical decisions to both engineers and executives
• Ownership Mentality: Takes full responsibility for team output, system reliability, and delivery timelines
• Product Thinking: Understands business context and makes technical decisions that balance speed, quality, and customer value
• Collaboration: Team player who fosters a safe, inclusive, and supportive work environment
• Agility: Comfortable in a fast-paced, cross-functional team with evolving priorities
• Continuous Learner: Stays current with engineering practices, especially AI-augmented development

What We Offer

• Direct collaboration with the CTO and influence on technical strategy
• Opportunity to shape engineering culture and practices from the ground up
• Work with modern tech stack and cutting-edge AI development tools
• Flexible hybrid work model (2 days/week in Berlin office)
• Growth opportunity as the engineering team scales

About the Role

This is a unique opportunity to join as the technical backbone of a growing e-commerce company. You'll have significant autonomy to establish engineering excellence, adopt innovative AI workflows, and build a world-class engineering team. If you're a strong engineer who loves to code AND lead, we'd love to hear from you.

Benefits

• A fast-growing, profitable company with a real purpose: animal health
• Bring your dog to work!
• A modern work environment in Berlin with the option to work remotely
• Employee discount on all BARFER’S products
• 30 days of annual vacation — and best of all: you get your birthday off!
• A €50 monthly BARFER’S card to treat yourself to whatever you like
• Discounts for the Deutschlandticket, JobRad, and more

Then send us your CV along with a short note (3 sentences) on why you are the right person for this role.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

If you have any questions, please contact:
Ange

Human Resources

Phone: +49 30 586 198 810

(At BARFER’S, we take pride in the diversity of our team. Decisions during hiring and employment are never based on skin color, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, nationality, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or age. BARFER’S provides a safe workplace and stands firmly against any form of discrimination or harassment.)