Principal Engineer (all genders)

Permanent position, full-time/part-time (min. 32 hours per week), Berlin + hybrid

About us

We are shaping a digital state - together with the administration. As a partner at eye level, we strengthen the administration on its way to driving its own digitalisation. With our own iterative product development and our commitment to better framework conditions, we create the basis for digital solutions that are scalable and effective.

Deine Aufgaben

As a Principal Engineer, you will lead architectural decisions for high-profile digitalisation projects and be responsible for development and operations in line with the ‘You build it, you run it’ principle. You’ll draw on your in-depth technical experience in areas such as Domain-Driven Design and DevSecOps to continuously improve the architecture, software, working structures and tools within the teams. You’ll advise stakeholders from a strong engineering perspective and make a direct contribution to ensuring the strategic and technical success of complex projects.

You can find out more about how we utilise DigitalService Engineering for the digitalisation of public administration in our blog post “Software development at DigitalService: more than just code”. Exciting and important information on how our delivery principles shape the way DigitalService operates and manages its projects can be found here.

What You'll Do

• Taking responsibility for architecture & setting standards: You are responsible for the architecture of large, complex projects. You establish standards for scalability, security and delivery, and take cross-team and cross-project architectural expertise to a new level.
• Communicating the vision: You shape the architectural vision in implementation projects and create documentation and diagrams to convey this clearly.
• Internal and external stakeholder management: You’ll be in close contact with senior management and project partners. You’ll lead and facilitate discussions right through to decision-making.
• Interdisciplinary collaboration: You’ll work closely with other tech leads and disciplines, and foster cross-team collaboration to clarify dependencies.
• Team coordination & mentoring: You design team structures to enable effective collaboration on complex software systems. You shape best practices, support learning journeys and strengthen specialist knowledge within the organisation.

What You're Bringing

• Full Stack & System Architecture: You have excellent knowledge of TS/Node, Java, cloud stacks, scalability and microservices. You have in-depth experience in designing future-proof systems and take a pragmatic approach to weighing up technical trade-offs.
• Technical Leadership & Domain-Driven Design (DDD): You manage technical debt, build consensus and establish consistent quality standards. You have skills in preparing and facilitating workshops (including Event Storming), defining bounded contexts and building a shared vocabulary across teams.
• Experience in Discovery & End-to-End Delivery: You have previously guided project/product teams through complex discovery and analysis phases and ensured the delivery process through your DevSecOps mindset and expertise in CI/CD, security-by-design and observability.
• Stakeholder Consulting: You bring extensive experience of working with external, largely non-technical stakeholders from regulated or complex ecosystems, as well as strong consulting and conflict resolution skills.
• Nice to have: Experience with technology projects in the public sector and familiarity with the German public administration (e.g. Deutschland Stack, ITZ Bund, etc.)
• Language skills: You have very good command of German and English (at least C1 level), as we use both languages in our day-to-day work.

Why Join Our Team?

• Our team of over 70 engineers (of all genders) is characterised by technical excellence, outstanding teamwork and communication skills, and a genuinely agile mindset.
• Join our team of more than 280 people, which works in an interdisciplinary and iterative manner – and is realising the vision of a digital state in collaboration with the Federal Administration. 
• Work in the way that suits you best: you can organise your working hours flexibly, make use of our remote working options at any time, and choose your preferred operating system.
• The salary for this role ranges from 90,000–110,000 euros gross per year. When determining your individual placement within our salary bands and levels, we take into account the scope of responsibility of the role, the complexity of the tasks and the assessment of your skills from the initial interviews. You can find details of our level and salary system in our blog post "About level, money, and fairness: our new salary system".
• Urban Sports Club & more: Every month, you’ll receive a €50 voucher on top of your salary, which you can use however you like. Fitness, tech, transport or food – the choice is yours!
• You have the opportunity to join a company pension scheme with attractive terms and an employer contribution.

You can find further benefits on our careers page.

How To Apply

We value a diverse workforce and an inclusive working environment. We therefore welcome all applications – regardless of religion or beliefs, nationality and (ethnic and social) background, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or physical and intellectual abilities.

We assess applications solely on the basis of professional qualifications and the key skills required for the role in question. We would therefore ask you to refrain from including a photograph of yourself in your CV and to remove any information regarding your place of age, gender, marital status or similar details.

Please submit your application via the online portal only.

Recruiting Process & Contact Person

Once we have received your application, we will send an invitation to an initial meeting (screening call) with the responsible person from our Talent Acquisition team or a rejection to you within two weeks. 

A successful screening call is followed by two to three interviews with DigitalService employees. The first interview will focus on your professional qualifications, followed by your values and expectations in terms of teamwork and collaboration. You can find out more about our recruitment process in our blog post “Recruiting at DigitalService – What applicants can expect”.

We are available at any time during the entire process for questions, feedback and dialogue. 

Do you have any questions for us? Your contact person is Denise Carstensen ((email: [email protected])).