Engineering Manager (m/f/d)

TOPdesk; Kaiserslautern; Hybrid; EUR 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Permanent employment contract

Remote work up to 50%

Holiday bonus

Flexible working hours

Career development opportunities

Job summary

TOPdesk is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead one or two teams with a clear technical mission across front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform. You will set team-level direction, own delivery, and drive AI-native SDLC practices while staying technically close through design, reviews, and incident response.

You will grow engineers into senior and staff roles, hire with clarity, and ensure quality and operational stability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent experience.
• Engineering manager with a track record of growing engineers and owning team delivery.
• Strong technical foundation in front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform domains.
• Current, personal practice of AI-native software delivery (Claude Code or equivalent).
• Strong on talent development; comfortable acting on tough calls.
• Comfortable in ambiguity and in legacy codebases; strong communicator.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical direction for your teams and ensure quality, security, and stability.
• Grow engineers into senior and staff roles and make tough talent calls with clarity and care.
• Own your teams' roadmap commitments, delivery, and operational outcomes; balance review burden with agentic SDLC considerations.
• Contribute to system and architecture decisions with Enterprise Architects and peers.

Skills

Team leadership

AI-native delivery

Technical direction

Talent development

Stakeholder communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in a technical field

Tools

Claude Code

Job description

TOPdesk builds service management software used across education, healthcare, government, and manufacturing. We are 800+ colleagues in 11 offices worldwide. Founded over 30 years ago, we serve more than 10 million users worldwide and have been helping organisations deliver better services ever since.

We are an open, collaborative organisation with little hierarchy — people own their work end to end and are trusted to make the decisions that matter. We are reinventing ITSM and ESM for the agentic era, building AI agents our customers can trust, and this role is part of that.

TOPdesk builds service management software used across education, healthcare, government, and manufacturing. We are 800+ colleagues in 11 offices worldwide. Founded over 30 years ago, we serve more than 10 million users worldwide and have been helping organisations deliver better services ever since.

We are an open, collaborative organisation with little hierarchy — people own their work end to end and are trusted to make the decisions that matter. We are reinventing ITSM and ESM for the agentic era, building AI agents our customers can trust, and this role is part of that.

Job Description

About the role

As an Engineering Manager, you lead one or two teams with a specific technical mission — front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform — giving both people and technical direction, and owning what your teams ship.

You set team-level technical direction within the wider architectural guardrails, grow strong engineers into stronger ones, and own delivery and operational outcomes — creating the conditions for your senior and staff engineers to provide technical leadership too. You operate agents yourself and lead our AI-native SDLC from the front. You report to your domain's senior engineering leader.

What this is not A purely process or Scrum-master role, or a hands-off manager who sets no technical direction. You lead people and technology together, and stay technically close through design, pairing, incident response, reviews, technical investigation, and agent workflows — regular individual coding output is not the measure of the role.

The team

You lead one or two teams with a specific mission — for example front-end feature development, middleware, back-end services, data, or platform.

• Delivers its part of the domain's roadmap.
• Sets and upholds the technical standards for its domain.
• Adopts the target architecture and our AI-native SDLC practices.
• Sits within a approx 170-strong engineering organisation across Delft, Budapest, and Kaiserslautern.

What you'll do

Provide technical direction

• Set technical direction and standards for your teams' domain, alongside your engineers.
• Make and steward the key technical decisions; uphold quality, security, and operational stability.
• Contribute to system and architecture decisions for your domain with the Enterprise Architects and your peers.

Grow the people

• Coach and develop your engineers — including growing strong ones into senior and staff engineers.
• Hire, and act on tough talent calls with clarity and care.

Own the delivery and the bar

• Own your teams' roadmap commitments and delivery and operational outcomes; protect cycle time, quality, and operational stability.
• Keep review sustainable in an agentic SDLC — ensure your teams do not create excessive review burden or unnecessary code, match agent autonomy to the risk of the task, and keep human accountability clear.
• Raise the engineering bar for your domain; make standards explicit and inspectable.
• Operate agents yourself — build the subagents, evals, and patterns your team reuses, and contribute them back to the shared libraries.

Technical environment

Claude Code is our current primary agentic engineering environment: agents may plan and execute within defined constraints and governed environments, while engineers stay accountable for problem framing, architecture, acceptance criteria, security, verification, and production outcomes. Agent-generated work is backed by automated tests, runtime checks, reviewable evidence, and risk-based human approval — we match deterministic automation, structured workflows, or agents to the nature and risk of the task rather than maximising autonomy for its own sake.

• Your domain: front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform — the specific stack depends on your teams' mission.
• Legacy: Java, MS SQL, heritage architecture — being decomposed.
• Modern: Python, TypeScript, Vue, Postgres, Azure, Kubernetes; cloud-native / service-oriented architecture; Terraform-managed infrastructure.
• Mechanisms: subagents, MCP tool integrations, multi-agent workflows, and shared prompt, agent, and eval libraries.

Success in your first year

• Your teams reliably deliver their part of the domain's roadmap, with measurably better cycle time, quality, and stability.
• Technical direction and standards for your domain are clear, owned, and upheld — the bar has gone up.
• Your engineers have grown, including movement into senior or staff roles.
• AI-native ways of working are normal in your team, with patterns and evals you contributed.

Qualifications

Required

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant technical field (e.g. Computer Science, Software Engineering, or Information Technology) or equivalent experience.
• Engineering manager with a track record of growing engineers — including into senior and staff roles — and owning team delivery.
• A strong technical foundation in a relevant domain (front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform) — you set team-level technical direction, not just run process.
• Current, personal practice of AI-native software delivery (Claude Code or equivalent) — you can show your work and lead by example.
• Strong on talent development; comfortable acting on tough calls.
• Comfortable in ambiguity and inside legacy codebases; a strong communicator.

Nice to have

• Led a team through a significant technical or operating-model change.
• Has built and shared subagents, evals, or CLAUDE.md conventions a team reused.
• Deep domain expertise relevant to one of the product domains.

Additional Information

What we offer

• Job security: Permanent employment contract
• Remote work: Option to work up to 50% remotely
• Compensation: Holiday bonus, special payments, monthly tax-free benefits in the form of a Mastercard, corporate benefits
• Flexible working models: Full-time and part-time positions, flexible working hours
• Vacation: 30 days of annual leave
• Onboarding: Comprehensive onboarding program and structured training with a dedicated buddy
• Family friendliness: Flexible parental leave arrangements, family-friendly leadership, support for caregiving responsibilities
• Culture: Informal “du” culture, open and collaborative work environment in an international setting
• Development: Individual training opportunities, language learning platform Babbel, and e-learning platform Udemy
• Health & well-being: OpenUp, Wellhub, and in-office massages
• Mobility: Free parking, bicycle parking, bike leasing, and a public transport ticket

You can find a complete list of our benefits here.

Are you interested?

If you have any questions, your contacts Fabienne Even and Michelle Dhom will be happy to assist you via email at [e-mail] or by phone at [phone].

Please note that this email address is intended exclusively for inquiries – applications cannot be submitted through it.

* We welcome applications from all interested parties, regardless of their ethnic and social background, age, religion, gender, disability, and sexual orientation or identity.