Job description
Principal Engineer (d/f/m)
Company Overview
mobile.de is Germany’s largest vehicle marketplace, with more than 1.6 million listed cars, commercial vehicles, motorcycles, and e-bikes (annual average 2025). Both private customers and registered vehicle dealers use the platform and benefit from more than 140 million visits per month*. As a “one-stop shop,” mobile.de’s offering includes not only buying and selling, but also financing and leasing solutions. Founded in 1996, the company is a subsidiary of Adevinta, a global leader in online classified portals.
Job Summary
This role is embedded in the Consumer Orientation & Specification (COS) cluster, one of mobile.de's three core Product & Tech (P&T) clusters. We are looking for a hands-on Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership across our Consumer engineering organization. This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who combines deep technical expertise with strong collaboration, communication, and mentoring skills.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead and align Consumer Area-wide architectural decisions, enabling teams to make sound technical decisions that satisfy business and functional needs
- Define, share, and own Technical Excellence goals within the Consumer Area
- Continuously assess technical debt and drive solutions at Consumer Area level
- Provide technical guidance and mentoring to Tech Leads in the Consumer Area, and support performance feedback
- Support teams with hands-on software development where needed due to complexity
- Proactively identify opportunities where AI tools can improve or completely redesign engineering processes to make them faster and better
- Champion responsible AI adoption within the Consumer Area, including human-in-the-loop practices, AI output validation, awareness of ethical considerations, EU AI Act compliance, and FinOps/ROI thinking
- Drive Native App technical & delivery excellence within and beyond the Consumer Area, understanding that Consumer feedback is key to success
Requirements / Qualifications
- Extensive hands-on experience in software engineering, with a proven track record at senior or principal level
- Experience working on high-volume traffic platforms
- Interest in Native App development, including its ways of working and software delivery processes
- Ability to design and evolve architectures for complex, large-scale software systems, with a strong sense of strategic and system-level thinking
- Experience with scalable distributed systems, APIs, and end-to-end system design
- Strong understanding of QA practices, observability, operational excellence, and cost-aware engineering (FinOps) to demonstrate end-to-end ownership, from development through to operations
- Experience collaborating closely with data teams or working on data-intensive systems
- Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to manage stakeholders and influence and align across teams and functions without direct authority
- Drives decisions by informed consent — ensuring the best technical argument wins, and committing decisively once a direction is set
- Experience providing technical guidance and mentoring to Tech Leads or senior engineers
- Participation in or leadership of cross-team technical communities such as a Community of Practice
- Active user of AI coding and productivity tools, with a growth mindset towards further AI adoption
- Fluent English; German is a nice-to-have given our Berlin office context
Location
Berlin, Germany (Hybrid)
Employment Type
Full Time
Salary & Benefits
Rewards: competitive base salary and participation in the company’s incentive programs. Plan for the Future: On top of the statutory retirement insurance, we offer a competitive company pension scheme. Team-Building: Regular team and company events offer the opportunity to network and learn from each other. Learning & Development: Keep growing with access to coaching, learning platforms and resources. Mobility: Stay mobile with a monthly transportation allowance. Enjoy working: Our well-equipped office supports focused work and teamwork – plus inviting social zones where colleagues can relax and connect. Flexible working: a hybrid approach with the option to work abroad for a set number of days per year. Wellbeing: confidential employee assistance and support services available to employees and their immediate families. Family support: enhanced parental leave and family-friendly policies to support all parents and careers.
Equal Opportunity Statement
mobile.de is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status or disability status.
