Senior Engineering Manager | AI Systems

You will lead the Workflow Platform team in the AI Systems track, sitting at the critical edge between Engineering and Research. The team builds and operates our central platform for implementing the AI-based workflows powering DeepL's Translate, Write, and Voice products. The platform has two parts:

• Engine: A distributed runtime (C++ & C#) that executes workflows at scale, handling load balancing and orchestration of requests to our neural networks.
• Framework: Python libraries and tooling for implementing the workflows, enabling product teams to easily build and productionize AI capabilities.

This is a high-leverage platform role: your work empowers internal product teams to run complex AI workflows in production at massive scale and with high reliability. You will lead a talented group of engineers solving hard distributed systems problems, ensuring our infrastructure stays ahead of our rapidly growing product ambitions., * People Leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of ~8 senior and staff engineers (expected to grow). You will be responsible for their well-being and growth through regular 1:1s, continuous feedback, performance reviews, and career coaching. This is a complex scope requiring you to dive deep into technical details while fostering a high-performing culture.

• Strategy: Define the technical strategy and roadmaps in partnership with your technical Product Manager. You will fill a critical gap by establishing a clear technical vision for the platform, ensuring it can support the long-term needs of both Research and Product. Bring clarity, focus, and context to your team.
• Execution & Delivery: Own the team's execution, delivery, and technical excellence. Drive continuous improvement of the team's operations, practices, and technology to ensure reliable delivery at a high pace. Guide the team in complex system design discussions (e.g., latency, concurrency, scale) and technical planning. Uphold high standards for reliability, performance, scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Stakeholder Management: Act as a central bridge between Research, Engineering, and Product. Communicate technical trade-offs clearly and build strong relationships with stakeholders across the business. You will be the key partner for Product teams relying on your platform to ship their features.
• Contribute hands-on when needed: Become familiar enough with the team's tech stack (C++, Python, C#) and system landscape to make targeted contributions and participate in the shared on-call rotation. You should be capable of reviewing code, analyzing metric data, and unblocking critical paths, maintaining your "engineering muscle".

Do you have experience in Software development?, * People management experience: 3+ years of direct people management experience, ideally managing a larger team (8+) or leading a team through significant growth and change.

• Strong technical foundations: High level of hands-on technical experience in backend software development or research engineering. You must have a track record of working on complex, distributed systems and be capable of understanding deep technical topics.
• Distributed systems experience: Proven experience designing, building, and operating scalable, highly available distributed systems. You are comfortable discussing trade-offs regarding performance, latency, and reliability in a high-scale environment.
• A "People-First" approach: A deep commitment to the growth and well-being of your team, with proven experience in coaching, mentorship, and performance management.
• Strong execution: A focus on execution and delivery, with a pragmatic approach to balancing technical excellence with the practical need to ship value.
• Excellent problem-solver: The ability to break down complex, ambiguous problems into concrete, actionable steps for your team.
• Clear communicator: Excellent communication skills in English with a strong sense of empathy.
• Big Tech / Scale-up Background: Experience working in a company with hundreds of engineers (or similar size to DeepL) where you have seen what a high-performing engineering organization looks like.

Star Qualities

• Leading a platform service team in a scale-up environment
• High-performance, large-scale distributed systems (C++, Go, Rust)
• Inference workflow orchestration and ML infrastructure
• Building services on AWS.

Helping people overcome communication barriers is the heart of what we do. Founded in Germany in 2017 by a team of engineers and researchers, DeepL has developed the world’s most accurate AI translation technology—enabling real-time, human-sounding translation.

Accessible via a web translator, browser extensions, desktop and mobile apps, and an API, DeepL supports a best-in-class translation experience in 34 languages and counting. Our 550-person team operates across four European hubs in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and Poland.