Engineering Manager, Rider (m/f/d) (Hamburg, Germany)

Engineering Manager, Rider (m/f/d)

Company Overview

We are Freenow, the European taxi app with the broadest multi-mobility offering, available in 9 markets and over 180 cities. Since July 2025 we have been part of Lyft, a global mobility platform connecting riders and drivers for billions of rides across North America and Europe. Together we are building a more caring and connected world, creating new opportunities for innovation, growth and impact.

Job Summary

Come and join us in Hamburg. Freenow by Lyft empowers smarter mobility decisions helping people to move freely and cities to thrive. We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a high-performing team of software engineers focused on our Rider domain — the customer-facing app and platform that millions of riders use every day. Your team will play a pivotal role in bringing Lyft's product experience to Europe, adapting and building the systems that let riders book rides seamlessly across all markets. This critical role ensures team’s alignment with product and business strategy, while driving efficient delivery of features. You will foster an environment of technical excellence, psychological safety, and continuous individual development, ultimately maximizing business impact across all Freenow markets through innovation.

Your Daily Adventures Will Include:

• Team Performance & Delivery: Within the frame of quarterly goals and company strategy, lead the team in delivering high-quality, scalable software solutions. Focus on continuously improving engineering processes to ensure predictable, timely delivery while managing team capacity and focus. You inspire innovation to disrupt incumbents.
• People Development: Provide coaching, mentoring, and continuous feedback to team members. Identify development areas and growth opportunities to support individual career paths and enhance team competence in building innovative customer and driver support solutions. You get to build a team from the ground up.
• Technical Ownership: In collaboration with Staff Engineers and Principals, lead technical decision-making for the support systems. Ensure high standards of quality, reliability, maintainability, and observability in all solutions, particularly the large-scale systems handling customer and driver interactions.
• Strategic Execution: Translate product and tech strategy into actionable team plans. Align team activities with business priorities, ensuring efficient execution and adapting plans as needed.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Act as the main engineering counterpart to Product Managers and Designers. Build strong relationships to ensure transparency, challenge product decisions where needed, and jointly maximize business impact by providing world-class support technology.
• Culture & Team Building: Foster a team culture based on trust, psychological safety, collaboration, and feedback. Ensure diverse perspectives are heard, encourage curiosity, and build a resilient and motivated team.
• Operational Excellence & Incident Management: Own incident response processes for support technology. Ensure alerting and monitoring are in place, bugs are addressed quickly, and technical debt is managed proactively to support long-term sustainability and reliability of the critical customer and driver support infrastructure.

Technology Stack

Java | Kotlin | AWS | Docker | Git | Kafka | ElasticSearch & more

To Be Successful In This Role:

• Minimum 5 years in software engineering roles, and at least 2 years in a leadership or management position.
• Deep understanding of the software development lifecycle and best practices.
• Experience with merge and migrate platforms.
• Strong leadership, coaching, and people development skills.
• Delivery/project management and agile methodology fluency.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Growth mindset, data-driven decision-making, and bias for action.

Benefits & Perks In A Nutshell:

• Flexible working arrangements
• LinkedIn Learning
• Sabbatical & special leave policies
• WeRoad partnership
• Birthday, 24th + 31st December off
• Short term EU work policy
• Mobility Credit
• Health Insurance
• Employee assistance program

Equal Opportunity Statement

Freenow is an equal opportunity employer and we consider qualified applicants regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or age. We want you to grow and evolve, bring your true self to work.