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Senior Engineering Manager - AI

DeepL SE

Job Overview

Location

Munich

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Own the end-to-end delivery of DeepL’s AI-powered products, translating cutting-edge research into reliable, scalable services that delight 100,000+ enterprise customers and millions of individual users worldwide.
• Partner with Product Management, Research, and Design to craft ambitious quarterly roadmaps, break epics into shippable increments, and ensure every release balances speed, quality, and long-term architectural health.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for a cross-functional team of 10–20 engineers, ML researchers, and data scientists; review designs, unblock gnarly production issues, and occasionally ship code yourself to keep credibility and context sharp.
• Establish and monitor engineering-excellence metrics (latency, reliability, cost-per-inference, experiment velocity) that directly influence DeepL’s ability to become the global leader in Language AI.
• Recruit, mentor, and retain world-class talent across backend, ML platform, and applied research domains; run weekly 1:1s, craft individual growth plans, and foster a feedback-rich culture where psychological safety fuels innovation.
• Co-own the technical roadmap with senior engineers and craft leads; prioritize migrations, technical debt, and infra investments that keep our AI stack ahead of 10× user growth.
• Act as incident commander for high-severity production issues, driving post-mortems that turn outages into durable improvements in observability, testing, and deployment automation.
• Champion continuous process evolution—from sprint rituals to MLOps workflows—so the team can ship multiple model updates per week without compromising stability or security.
• Collaborate with Legal, Security, and Compliance to ensure every new feature meets enterprise-grade standards for data privacy, GDPR, and ISO 27001.
• Represent DeepL externally at conferences, meet-ups, and customer councils, sharing how we turn transformer research into products that break down language barriers in real time.
• Navigate the unique challenges of applied research: balance long-horizon R&D bets with short-term product needs, protect exploratory time, and still hit predictable delivery dates.
• Drive quarterly OKRs that tie team output to business impact—e.g., “reduce document-translation latency by 30 %” or “launch multilingual summarization that increases daily active usage by 15 %.”
• Coordinate with our globally distributed teams (UK, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, US, Japan) to maintain 24-hour follow-the-sun support and seamless hand-offs.
• Instill a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing so new joiners reach full productivity within weeks, not months.
• Stay ahead of industry trends—evaluate new LLM architectures, GPU/TPU cost curves, and open-source frameworks—then make build-vs-buy recommendations that keep DeepL at the frontier.

🎯 Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years leading teams that shipped AI/ML products to production at scale.
• Proven record of scaling engineering organizations through a high-growth phase (e.g., 2× headcount or 10× traffic year-over-year).
• Deep technical credibility in NLP, LLMs, or adjacent AI domains; able to review model code, reason about distributed training infra, and debate transformer fine-tuning strategies with researchers.
• Demonstrated ability to balance research uncertainty with product predictability—turning prototypes into hardened services without killing innovation.
• Exceptional communication skills in English; able to explain complex technical trade-offs to executives, customers, and non-technical stakeholders with empathy and clarity.

🏖️ Benefits

• 30 days of annual leave plus public holidays and mental-health resources to recharge and stay at peak creativity.
• Hybrid work model—come to the Munich office twice a week, enjoy flexible hours, and collaborate across 90+ nationalities in a truly global culture.
• Monthly Hack Fridays—dedicate a full day to passion projects, cross-team experimentation, or that wild idea that might become DeepL’s next breakthrough.
• Competitive, location-tailored benefits package covering health, pension, parental leave, and more, ensuring you feel supported wherever you call home.

Skills & Technologies

Express

Senior

Hybrid

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DeepL SE

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About DeepL SE

DeepL SE develops and operates neural machine translation technology. Founded in 2017 as Linguee GmbH, the Cologne-based company rebranded in 2019 after creating DeepL Translator, a service noted for outperforming Google Translate in blind tests. The platform supports 33 languages and offers browser, desktop, mobile and API access, serving individuals, businesses, and developers worldwide. Revenue comes from tiered subscription plans for pro features and volume-based API usage. DeepL continues to invest in AI research to maintain translation quality and expand language coverage.

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