About this role
Founded in 2017, refurbed is Europe’s fastest-growing marketplace for refurbished products, active in 23 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).
Lead the design and delivery of AI-powered internal tools and systems that enable refurbed to operate as an AI-native company under our AI & Tech Transformation program. Act as a product-minded senior back-end engineer for internal AI across teams to identify opportunities, architect solutions, and directly build the back-end services and integrations that embed AI and automation into how employees work. Partner closely with the Head of Internal Technology & AI on strategy, planning, and execution while providing technical leadership to teams, working closely with core platform Engineering for support. Success in this role is measured by productivity improvements, enabling new capabilities, and adoption of AI tools and new ways of working across the company.
WHO YOU ARE:
Proven track record as a senior/staff back-end engineer with hands-on experience building production systems in Go, Python, or similar; comfortable designing for scale, reliability, and cost on GCP
Experience building AI/LLM-powered systems in production - from prototyping with model APIs through deployment, observability, and iteration
Strong product instincts in the classic PM sense - has owned a product area end-to-end with discovery, PRDs, roadmap, success metrics, and measurable outcomes; not just "used AI tools as a backend engineer"
Stakeholder management across senior leaders and department teams; able to align people around trade-offs and unblock cross-functional delivery
Comfortable balancing IC engineering work with technical leadership: setting direction, reviewing designs, and mentoring others without losing hands-on fluency
Deep, practical fluency with modern AI tooling and active engagement with the fast-moving ecosystem - has worked extensively with multiple coding assistants (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor), knows how to structure, build, and install skills/plugins/marketplaces, can design and integrate MCPs, and works fluently with subagents and agent harnesses; able to make informed build vs. buy trade-offs
Location & eligibility: This role is open to candidates based in Europe (including UK) only with a valid right to work.
Responsibilities
- Back-end engineering & architecture
- Design and build back-end services, APIs, and integrations with external tools, services, and models that power internal AI tools and systems, designing for scale, reliability, and cost
- Lead the architecture and design of internal AI tools and systems that support company-wide productivity and automation goals, leveraging the existing data foundation and platform tooling
- Define technical approaches, evaluate trade-offs (build vs. buy, model selection, integration patterns), and create implementation roadmaps
- Implement and refine tooling standards, runtime, and best practices for AI development within the governance framework set with the Head of Internal Technology & AI
- Product management & discovery
- Run deep-dive discovery on prioritised use cases from the AI portfolio, and surface bottom-up opportunities to feed into it
- Own the product roadmap for internal AI tools - translating messy, cross-functional problems into clear requirements, PRDs, and milestones
- Ship company-wide shared AI services and a baseline AI toolkit every new joiner gets on day one
- Partner with the Head of Internal Technology & AI on strategy execution, technical feasibility assessments, and prioritisation
- Cross-functional enablement & technical leadership
- Drive cross-functional technology initiatives to embed AI into internal workflows, partnering with stakeholders across the business
- Provide technical leadership and guidance to teams working on AI-related projects - review designs, set direction, unblock delivery
- Support adoption of the internal AI tools you build, through demos and hands-on integration guidance
- Stay current on AI/ML trends and tooling to inform strategic decisions and identify new opportunities
- 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!