About this role
Founded in 2017, refurbed is Europe’s fastest-growing marketplace for refurbished products, active in 12 European countries and having surpassed €2Bn in GMV — all while being profitable. With beautiful headquarters in Vienna, we operate as a remote-first company, and our 250+ employees enjoy up to two months of workation per year. We’ve also been recognised as a Top DACH Employer by Kununu for three consecutive years.
Our mission is to make sustainable consumption the easy choice by enabling customers to buy products up to 40% cheaper while significantly reducing CO₂ emissions.
If you thrive in an environment that values momentum, ownership, and impact, you’ll feel at home here. We’re a fast-paced, high-performance team that works hard and challenges itself everyday. To enable this high-performance every team member enjoys full autonomy over their location (we’re remote-first).
We are seeking an Engineering Manager (f/m/x) to lead our Customer Success and Delivery & Returns. You will build high-performing engineering teams, ensure technical excellence, and partner with product and business to deliver reliable, impactful solutions that improve the customer experience end to end.
Our technology stack includes Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Redis, and RabbitMQ on the backend, with infrastructure running on Google Cloud Platform and orchestrated with Kubernetes.
WHO YOU ARE:
Leadership:
You are a strong, trusted engineering leader with 4+ years of experience managing senior backend and frontend engineers
You have a proven ability to develop, mentor, and retain engineering talent, as well as manage performance with clarity and empathy
You lead with low ego, openness, and a belief in autonomy and empowerment, where engineers take ownership and collaborate effectively
Technical experience:
You have a solid understanding of backend systems, distributed architectures, and how scalable services are designed, enabling you to actively participate in architectural discussions and guide teams toward sound decisions
You rely on strong collaboration with senior and staff-level engineers and architects, ensuring that solutions are well-reasoned, maintainable, and aligned with broader technical direction
You understand SQL, relational database concepts, and modern backend practices well enough to provide context, make informed decisions, and remove ambiguity
While you are not expected to be hands-on day to day, you feel confident reviewing high-level designs, evaluating trade-offs, and ensuring that the team ships robust, thoughtful solutions
Collaboration:
You thrive in remote, distributed and cross-functional environments, partnering effectively with product managers, designers, and business stakeholders
You ask the right questions, identify risks, challenge assumptions, and help engineers balance long-term quality with pragmatic delivery
You influence through clarity and context rather than authority, building alignment across teams and domains
Engineering culture:
You cultivate a culture focused on ownership and reliability
You promote modern engineering practices, clear processes, and effective ways of working that enable predictable delivery
You foster transparency, feedback, and knowledge-sharing, while rejecting a blame culture. Mistakes are learning opportunities
You are self-directed, aligned with objectives, and comfortable navigating ambiguity
Additional background:
Excellent English skills and based in a European time zone
A degree in Computer Science or related field (or equivalent experience) that provides a strong foundation for system-level thinking
Location & eligibility: This role is open to Europe-based candidates only with a valid right to work.
Responsibilities
- Manage and support engineers across the Customer Success and Delivery & Returns teams, ensuring they have a clear mission, and healthy processes
- Conduct regular 1:1s, mentor engineers, and support their personal and professional growth
- Build psychological safety, enable ownership, and help team members unlock their potential
- Facilitate technical discussions, architecture reviews, and design decisions to ensure reliability, scalability, and maintainability
- Ensure your teams produce high-quality engineering outcomes by promoting best practices and establishing clear quality standards
- Occasionally contribute to code reviews or smaller technical tasks when needed—while keeping your focus on team impact, not hands-on development
- Work closely with Product and cross-functional partners to define goals, shape roadmaps, and ensure predictable execution
- Identify and resolve blockers, surface risks early, and maintain a productive environment where teams can move quickly with clarity
- Contribute to company and squad-level planning, influencing both short- and long-term strategies
- Maintain strong communication loops with your manager, engineering leadership, and stakeholders
- Communicate progress transparently, celebrate achievements, and ensure business partners know what to expect and when
- Strengthen the engineering culture through feedback, knowledge sharing, documentation, and leading by example
- Encourage experimentation, learning, and adoption of modern tools and practices
- Promote collaboration across engineering teams to solve cross-domain challenges
- WHY YOU WILL ENJOY WORKING WITH US:
- Our Culture and Values:
- Decisions should be made based on facts and not by hierarchy levels? We sure think so!
- We embrace giving and receiving feedback, testing and welcoming new ideas, as well as sharing our knowledge across the company.
- You fail sometimes? Well, so do we! We’re all just human, let’s learn from our mistakes to improve in the future!
- No matter who you love, where you’re from, who you pray to, whether you pee sitting down or standing up – we are a bunch of talented people who enjoy spending our time making a difference!
- Personal & Professional Development:
- You'll have access to a dedicated learning budget within your department to support your growth, whether it's courses, conferences, or other learning opportunities that matter to you.
- We partner with Likeminded, offering you private sessions with experts for your personal growth and mental health.
- We frequently host internal workshops, allowing our teams to further develop their skills in different areas and enhancing collaboration across departments.
- Flexibility:
- We care about a healthy work/life balance. We not only function and support a fully remote setting but also offer the possibility to work from our beautiful office in the vibrant heart of Vienna – we love dogs, so feel free to bring your furry little buddy too 😊
- We trust you to do the best job, so we don't care so much when you do it – you are able to self-organize.
- You will also be invited to take part in our office weeks, happening three times a year, where you will have the chance to work side by side with your colleagues and enjoy the team-building events and on-site workshops
- …and much more! See https://careers.refurbed.com/ for further insights!