Head of engineering

Intro

We’re looking for a Head of Engineering who can grow and lead a high-performing team while staying grounded in the technical details and close to code. You’ll help us design robust systems, shape our engineering culture, grow our team, and ensure we deliver with velocity and quality.

Why work at Feather?

• Small team, flat hierarchy, and mission-driven. The usual buzzwords here, except we mean them. We’re small, lean, and we love what we're doing.
• €1,200 annual learning budget. You can spend this time educating yourself through books, conferences, classes, etc.

• €500 office furnishing budget. On top of all the basic company equipment such as MacBook, monitor and so on, you'll be able to spend €500 on a nice and comfortable home office setup.

• 4-month sabbatical. After 4 years at Feather, you can take 4 months off, with financial support from us, to do whatever energizes you: travel the world, write a book, volunteer, or just unwind.

• Flexible remote work policy. We offer a remote-first work environment with an office in Berlin. We host regular company retreats, team dinners, and meetups to gather with your colleagues.

What you’ll do

You’ll be both a hands-on builder and a team leader. We think you’ll spend at least 30% of your time on design, reviews, and coding, while also growing the team, shipping high-impact initiatives, and keeping our engineering culture strong.

Our stack: We run on GCP and use TypeScript almost everywhere, from backend services (NestJS) to our frontend (React, Next.js). Infrastructure is managed with Terraform, and data with Prisma. We keep things simple where it counts, without compromising on scalability or developer experience.

Build and lead our engineering team

• Mentor and support. Coach engineers at all levels, giving regular, clear feedback to help them grow and succeed.

• Define roles and responsibilities. Ensure everyone knows their scope and how to succeed in it.

• Own performance processes. Set up and lead our annual performance reviews and salary calibrations.

• Maintain our engineering career framework. Keep our seniority and compensation grid fair, up-to-date, and motivating.

Drive technical excellence and delivery

• Push strategic initiatives. Lead projects that raise the bar across the company – from AI adoption and developer experience, to knowledge sharing and cross-team collaboration.

• Ensure strong delivery. Help us become a high-performance org where we solve root problems, not symptoms.

• Establish and evolve best practices. In system design, scalability, code quality, and knowledge documentation.

• Shape our technical roadmap. Partner with product, design, and business leads to ensure technical efforts are aligned with company goals.

Build a strong engineering culture

• Lead knowledge-sharing efforts. From PR reviews and tech talks to book clubs and dev blog posts, you’ll find initiatives that organically spread knowledge and help engineers learn from each other and grow.
• Organize team rituals. Hack days, regular syncs with other departments, weekly dev discussions. All the things that keep teams energised and aligned.
• Recruit thoughtfully. Identify future hiring needs, plan for team growth, and lead recruitment efforts to bring in the right people at the right time.

Your profile

• You’re both a builder and a leader. You’re comfortable across the stack and bring working knowledge of DevOps, cloud providers, and application security. You’re happy to contribute to our codebase when needed, but you understand that your biggest leverage is when you enable others.

• You’ve led high-performing engineering teams before. Our current engineering team is around 15 people, and we’re growing. You should have experience managing a team of this size or larger, ideally in a fast-paced startup or scale-up environment.

• You think in systems. Whether it’s tech architecture or org design, you design for resilience, scalability, and clarity.

• You have strong opinions, loosely held. You advocate for best practices but listen openly and adjust when needed.

• You care about people and processes. You know that healthy teams deliver better software, and you help make that happen.

Does this sound like you? Apply now!

• At Feather, we continuously work to have inclusive representation within our teams and embrace a diverse mix of talent to contribute to our culture.

• We also encourage people without degrees to apply: we believe that what you've worked on and achieved is way more important than on-paper qualifications.

About us

Feather was founded in 2018 by Rob Schumacher and Vincent Audoire after both of them struggled to navigate the insurance system in Germany (even though they are European). They wanted to create insurance products that were as simple as they knew it could be.

That’s why we’re building insurance to make all interactions easier and more transparent: from signing up and filing a claim to canceling. Our goal is to give people honest, unbiased advice, with the information they need to make the right decision. And, because of how complicated insurance is, we offer tools, articles, and support where people can reach out to a human about problems or questions they have.

Currently, Feather has helped people from over 150 countries get insurance digitally and is expanding quickly.