Engineering Manager

About the Position:

We’re looking for the first Engineering Manager to join as Bluefish’s engineering leadership team. This is not just a leadership role—it’s a unique opportunity to help shape the foundation of a fast-moving, product-driven startup during a critical phase of growth.

You’ll lead the charge on execution, quality, and team culture. You'll help transform early-stage velocity into mature, high-performing teams—without losing the edge and pace that define great startups.

This role demands a builder’s mindset, strong product understanding, and a deep sense of ownership. You’ll have a massive opportunity to shape how we hire, how we work, and how we scale—not just the technology, but the team and product itself. If you’re excited by high-impact challenges, fast cycles, and the chance to leave a lasting mark, we’d love to talk.

The role can be based in Berlin and remote in Germany,   

 

What you’ll be doing:

Scale the team: Lead hiring and onboarding as we grow from a small, tight-knit team to a high-performing engineering organization.

Drive execution excellence: Ensure the team delivers with high velocity, quality, and reliability—while maintaining strong cross-functional alignment. Implement and evolve processes, tools, and metrics to support scalable and repeatable delivery.

Lead and mentor: Support and grow individual contributors through coaching and feedback—helping them become the best version of themselves and ensuring alignment with what the team needs to succeed.

Own engineering culture: Champion a culture of technical excellence, autonomy, ownership, and collaboration.

Collaborate cross-functionally: Work closely with product, design, and business leads to define the team roadmap and business goals.

Make technical contributions: Contribute in code reviews and establish processes that keep pushing the bar on engineering excellence. While you might not code every day, you should be capable of engaging deeply on architecture, technical decisions, and trade-offs.

Ensure platform reliability: Set up guardrails, monitoring, and alerting with the team, and drive incident response to uphold operational excellence and deliver the best possible experience for our enterprise customers.

Continuously improve: Identify and address bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or misalignments—always looking for ways to raise the bar.

 

Qualifications:

• Have experience leading and scaling high-performing engineering teams in multiple organizations.
• Have strong product acumen and a deep sense of customer empathy. You act as a sparring partner—challenging the team and product to build solutions customers truly love.
• Have a track record of delivering complex, high-quality software in a product-focused environment.
• Are fluent in modern development practices—CI/CD, cloud platforms (ideally AWS), infrastructure automation, testing, and system reliability.
• Have excellent communication and stakeholder management skills. You can influence cross-functionally and empower teams to make decisions that align with both technical and business needs.
• Lead with humility, clarity, and high standards. You’re as comfortable rolling up your sleeves when teams need it as you are empowering others by setting clear expectations and upholding the bar without micromanagement.
• Have previous experience in a startup environment and thrive in fast-moving, ambiguous situations. You know how to operate without much structure—and enjoy building it.
• Want to be part of building something meaningful from the ground up.

 

About Bluefish:

Bluefish believes that AI represents the next major chapter of the internet – and that consumers will increasingly use AI to consume information and media online. On this new AI internet, brands will need new tools and technologies to tell their stories to consumers online – and a new marketing ecosystem will be created around AI. Bluefish is building the platform that helps brands engage consumers on this new AI channel, with powerful enterprise tools to manage AI brand safety and engage consumers with thoughtful and personalized AI marketing experiences. 

The Bluefish team is a tight-knit group of mar-tech industry veterans who previously helped build foundational ad-tech platforms now owned by Meta and Microsoft. Bluefish, the leading AI marketing platform for the Fortune 500, recently announced a $20M Series A funding round led by NEA, with participation from Salesforce Ventures. Additional investors include Crane Venture Partners, Swift Ventures, and Bloomberg Beta. We are a globally distributed team, with business operations based in New York City and engineering based in Berlin.  We are a globally distributed team, with business operations based in New York City and engineering based in Berlin.

Why Bluefish & Our Values:

• Unique opportunity to join on the ground floor of a fast-moving startup building at the center of AI 
• Tackle challenging and abstract problems while disrupting the $300BN legacy mar-tech industry 
• Join an experienced high-performing team where you will have immediate ownership and impact 
• Experience a true meritocracy with significant career growth upside as the business scales 

Our Values:

• Demonstrated grit and resourcefulness—you find creative solutions, adapt quickly, and aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
• Thoughtful and strategic thinker with the ability to anticipate needs, ask the right questions, and deliver insights that truly drive value.
• Proven ability to collaborate across functions and roles, fostering open communication and shared ownership of outcomes.
• Commitment to craftsmanship—you take pride in delivering high-quality work, paying attention to the small details while keeping the big picture in mind.
• Self-starter with a proactive mindset and a strong sense of accountability—able to drive projects forward independently while staying aligned with team goals.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and learning new tools, processes, or technologies to get the job done.