Engineering Manager (AI)

Location: Kaiserslautern, Germany or the Netherlands, with the option to work up to 50% remotely

Company

TOPdesk builds service management software for education, healthcare, government, and manufacturing organisations, serving more than 10 million users with over 800 colleagues worldwide.

What you will do

• Lead one or two engineering teams across front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform domains.
• Set technical direction, standards, and architecture decisions within established architectural guardrails.
• Own roadmap delivery, cycle time, quality, security, and operational stability.
• Coach and develop engineers, including helping strong engineers progress into senior and staff roles.
• Operate AI agents, build reusable subagents and evaluations, and contribute patterns to shared libraries.
• Collaborate with Enterprise Architects and senior engineering leaders on system and domain decisions.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant technical field or equivalent experience.
• Experience as an Engineering Manager growing engineers and owning team delivery.
• Strong technical foundation in front-end, middleware, back-end, data, or platform engineering.
• Current hands-on practice with AI-native software delivery using Claude Code or an equivalent tool.
• Strong talent-development and communication skills, with the ability to make difficult talent decisions.
• Comfort working with ambiguity and legacy codebases.

Nice to have

• Experience leading significant technical or operating-model change.
• Experience building and sharing subagents, evaluations, or CLAUDE.md conventions.
• Deep expertise in a relevant product domain.

Culture & Benefits

• Permanent employment contract with full-time and part-time options.
• Flexible working hours and the option to work remotely up to 50%.
• 30 days of annual leave, holiday bonuses, special payments, and corporate benefits.
• Structured onboarding with a dedicated buddy, training opportunities, language learning, and e-learning platforms.
• Family-friendly policies, caregiving support, and health and well-being programmes.
• Open, collaborative, low-hierarchy environment with mobility benefits including parking, bike leasing, and public transport support.