<div class="show-more-less-html__markup show-more-less-html__markup--clamp-after-5 relative overflow-hidden"> <p>Smart Host is a B2B SaaS platform helping hotels turn fragmented guest and booking data into actionable insights.</p><p><br/></p><p>For 2026, we’re taking the platform to the next level by building a broader hospitality ecosystem that connects selected technology partners to improve the guest experience across the entire hotel journey.</p><p><br/></p><p><strong>What you'll do</strong></p><p><br/></p><p>As our Backend Team Lead, you will lead the engineering efforts behind our core hospitality platform and directly manage a team of 4–5 backend engineers. You will report directly to the CTO. This is a technical leadership role with a meaningful hands-on component: you will spend roughly 40% of your time on backend engineering, architecture, code reviews, and technical decision-making, and 60% on team leadership, mentoring, planning, and cross-functional collaboration. You will help ensure our architecture scales as our customer base grows.</p><p><br/></p><p><strong>Your tasks in a nutshell:</strong></p><p><br/></p><ul><li>Technical Leadership: Lead and mentor a team of backend engineers, supporting a culture of ownership, transparency, and continuous learning. </li><li>Architectural Ownership: Own the backend services, APIs, integrations, and business logic behind our core hospitality platform, ensuring the system is built for scale and resilience.</li><li>Manage Complexity: Identify and reduce technical debt, improve existing systems, and rethink architecture when necessary.</li><li>AI-Augmented Engineering Culture: Champion the team's use of modern AI development tools, helping engineers integrate them into their daily workflow while maintaining high standards for code quality and architectural integrity.</li></ul><p><br/></p><p><strong>What you bring</strong></p><p><br/></p><ul><li>Relevant Leadership Experience: You have 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience, including 2+ years leading engineers through mentoring, code reviews, knowledge sharing, and team development.</li><li>Strong Java Background: You are highly proficient in Java and have deep experience with the Spring Boot ecosystem.</li><li>Cloud Native: You have experience with Kubernetes and modern backend tooling, including Helm, Terraform, and Gradle.</li><li>Systems Thinker: You understand the fundamentals of networking, distributed computing, and asynchronous messaging.</li><li>Ownership Mindset: You take responsibility beyond your immediate task and dig deep into the stack to find and fix the source of a problem.</li><li>Pragmatic Engineer: You care about clean code and refactoring but understand the balance between perfection and time-to-market in a startup.</li><li>AI-Forward Mindset: You're hands-on with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, agentic workflows) and have opinions on using them well. You see them as a force multiplier for senior engineers, not a gimmick, and you have a point of view on what they're good at and where they still fall short.</li><li>Fluency in English: You communicate fluently in English, both verbally and in writing. German skills are an advantage.</li><li>Entitlement to work in Germany: You are legally entitled to work in Germany and do not require visa sponsorship. For legal hiring reasons, we can only consider candidates based in Germany for this role.</li></ul><p><br/></p><p><strong>Why Smart Host</strong></p><p><br/></p><ul><li>Real impact: You will have direct influence on technical decisions, architecture, and the growth of our backend team.</li><li>Hybrid or remote within Germany: Work hybrid from our Berlin office or remotely from within Germany. We occasionally bring the team together in Berlin for workshops, planning, and collaboration. </li><li>Team culture: Join a diverse, multicultural team with an open office culture and a few four-legged colleagues.</li><li>Smart Host Days - Team Travel: Once a year, we take the whole team on a trip abroad. The trip combines team bonding, training, and the chance to live our mission: making vacation smart.</li></ul><p><br/></p><p><br/></p><p>Unsere Datenschutzrichtlinien für Bewerber: www.smart-host.com/de/datenschutzerklaerung</p> </div>