Director of Engineering, Communications

Hellofresh; Berlin (NH); Hybrid; USD 168,000 - 257,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discounts on HelloFresh kit

Company pension

Urban Sports Club access

Headspace and Spill access

Work From Home/Abroad options

Deutschlandticket allowance

Learning & Development budget

Office in Berlin-Kreuzberg

Job summary

The Communications Tribe within HelloFresh is seeking a Director of Engineering, Communications, to lead the engineering organisation across Berlin (and Warsaw). You will set technical direction for an autonomous, self-optimising CRM communication system and partner with Product, Marketing and CRM teams to deliver personalisation at scale.

You will drive reliability, governance, and guardrails, expanding channels and steering the company toward AI-native engineering practices.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering
• 4+ years managing Engineering Managers or Leads
• Led teams across multiple offices and built trust without daily co-location
• Deep technical credibility in large-scale backend, data and event-driven systems
• Experience with applied ML and automated decisioning in production
• Built self-service platforms with governance and guardrails
• Experience building AI-native engineering practices and AI-driven products
• Strong grounding in SRE: SLOs/SLIs, observability, incidents, on-call culture
• Experience in CRM, messaging, customer data or personalization systems is a plus

Responsibilities

• Lead the Communications engineering organisation across Berlin and Warsaw
• Own the technical strategy for an autonomous, self-optimising communication system
• Drive true personalisation across channels
• Build platforms enabling non-engineers to create and steer communications
• Ensure reliability and operational excellence with SLOs, monitoring and on-call maturity
• Expand channels from experiments to scaled solutions
• Lead transformation into a GenAI-native engineering organisation
• Coach and develop Engineering Leads and Staff Engineers
• Navigate organisational change with maturity

Skills

Leadership at scale

Technical credibility

Platform thinking

AI-native leadership

SRE / Operational excellence

CRM/personalisation domain fluency

Cross-functional collaboration

Clear communication

Ownership mindset

Job description

The Communications Tribe

The Communications Tribe is part of HelloFresh's Growth Alliance. Our mission is to enable a highly personalised, automated CRM communication ecosystem that prioritises user-centric engagement across our owned channels: email, push, SMS, in-app and embedded.

The problems we are solving:

• How anyone with a good reason to speak to customers can do it safely and in minutes.
• How we make sure every customer gets the right message, at the right moment, through the right channel, so that our communication is truly personal.
• How we move to an autonomous, self-optimising system that continuously learns from every past interaction and gets better with each send.
• How we make sure we can reach our customers in their preferred channels.

Our vision is to decentralise how HelloFresh talks to people across the whole relationship with us: prospects, subscribers and those who have left. Setting up and steering communications stops being the job of a small group of specialists and becomes something teams across the business can do safely, on top of tools and an intelligence layer that we build and that learn from every send. That loop reaches beyond CRM, so the customer experience is coherent from the first ad someone sees to the communication that converts and retains them.

As Director of Engineering, Communications, you will lead the engineering organisation that makes this real. You will set technical direction, hold the bar for reliability and operational excellence, and partner with Product, Marketing and CRM teams to turn the vision into working systems.

What you'll do

• Lead the Communications engineering organisation through a layer of Engineering Leads and Staff Engineers, across Berlin and Warsaw.
• Own the technical strategy for an autonomous, self-optimising communication system that learns from every interaction, and turn it into reality together with Product, Marketing and CRM teams.
• Drive the move to true personalisation, so that every person we talk to gets the right message, at the right moment, through the right channel.
• Build platforms that let teams across the business create and steer communications safely and on their own, inside clear guardrails.
• Own the reliability and operational excellence of every system we run: SLOs, monitoring and alerting, incident management and on-call maturity, so that problems are caught before anyone downstream notices.
• Expand our reach into new channels, from early experiments to scaled solutions, based on how people actually want to hear from us.
• Lead our transformation into a GenAI-native engineering organisation, from AI-assisted development to agentic workflows embedded in everyday operations.
• Manage, coach and develop Engineering Leads and Staff Engineers, holding them accountable for team health, delivery and engineering standards.
• Navigate organisational change with maturity, keeping teams focused and motivated as priorities evolve.

What you'll bring

• Proven leadership at scale. 10+ years in software engineering, with 4+ years managing Engineering Managers or Leads. You have led teams across multiple offices and built trust without daily co-location.
• Deep technical credibility. You can set direction for large-scale backend, data and event-driven systems, and you understand how applied machine learning and automated decisioning behave in production.
• Platform thinking. A track record of building self-service platforms that enable non-engineers to work safely and quickly, including the governance and guardrails that make that possible.
• AI-native leadership. You have built or scaled AI-native engineering practices and AI-driven products, not just adopted AI tools.
• Operational excellence mindset. Strong grounding in SRE practices: SLOs and SLIs, observability, incident management and on-call culture for systems that directly touch customers.
• Customer communication or personalisation domain fluency, or a strong aptitude to build it quickly. Experience with CRM, messaging, customer data or personalisation systems, and with measuring impact through experimentation, is a strong plus.
• Cross-functional collaboration. You work comfortably with Product, Marketing and CRM teams, and translate business outcomes into engineering priorities and back.
• Clear communication across disciplines, from engineers to senior business stakeholders.
• Low ego, high ownership, and a bias toward clarity over complexity.

Nice to have

• Experience taking a newly modernised platform from rollout to stable, self-service operation at scale.
• Experience building or scaling AI agents that make customer-facing decisions, with impact measured against a control group.
• Familiarity with consent, privacy and deliverability requirements for customer communication across multiple countries.
• A background in subscription, e-commerce or consumer businesses operating in many markets.
• Experience introducing new messaging channels, including conversational ones.

What we offer

• Enjoy a discount on HelloFresh meal kits, delivered straight to your door.
• Build for the long-term with our company pension scheme (not available for interns/working students).
• Benefit from discounted memberships with Urban Sports Club and John Reed, yoga classes, and access to Headspace and Spill.
• Balance your work and life with flexible hours, Work From Home/Abroad options, and a home office setup budget.
• Receive childcare support (not available for interns/working students).
• Get a monthly allowance for the Deutschlandticket to support sustainable commuting.
• Embrace "Learning Never Stops" with access to internal trainings and a central L&D budget (remove for interns).
• Work from a modern, comfortable office in Berlin-Kreuzberg and enjoy social events like team outings, Friday beers, and company runs.