Backend Team Lead

About komoot

Komoot is an app that lets you find, plan, and share adventures with its easy route planner. Driven by a love for nature and powered by the outdoor community’s recommendations, komoot helps you explore more of the great outdoors—wherever and however you want. And we’re good at it. Google and Apple have listed us as one of their Apps of the Year numerous times. Today, with over 40 million users and 300,000 five-star reviews, we are well on our way to becoming the most popular app for finding, planning, and sharing adventures worldwide.

Join our 100% remote team and start your adventure with komoot.

About the role

As the backend team, we enable users to explore the outdoors by rapidly creating and operating high throughput and high quality APIs. These serve as a gateway to our features, used by our client apps (web, Android, iOS, GPS devices, … ) as well as many partners such as Garmin, Wahoo, and Bosch. In this role, you’ll lead a team of six talented backend engineers, creating a productive environment where they can collaborate, grow, and do their best work.

You’ll also guide our tech choices, redesign and evolve the team’s processes, as well as find, hire and onboard new team members. You’re all about helping the team reach new heights, so they can drive komoot forward on its journey to become the world’s leading outdoor platform.

What you’ll do

• Be the advocate and voice of the backend team at komoot.
• Build and develop your team: Recruit, onboard, and mentor backend engineers.
• Monitor your teammates’ performance, coach them on professional and personal development, conduct salary negotiations, lead hiring and offboarding processes.
• Foster collaboration, knowledge sharing, and skill development among team members.
• Establish best practices for team processes.
• Set goals for team development and technical innovation, and ensure your team achieves and is celebrated for them.
• Help the team build a modern and effective tech stack at an industry-leading level.
• Keep an overview of modern backend technologies, manage technical projects, and orchestrate technical decisions.
• Manage external services and tools, and oversee contracts with vendors and suppliers.
• Collaborate with analytics, data science, as well as the frontend and other backend teams.

You’ll be successful in this role if you

• Are a passionate team leader and bring a strong technical background in backend development.
• Have 3+ years of experience as the lead of a long-term and high-performing team.
• Have 5+ years of experience in backend engineering (preferably Kotlin, Java, or Python).
• Have 2+ years of experience with managed cloud services, ideally using AWS.
• Know how to build scalable, data-intensive backend systems and APIs.
• Share complex ideas in clear and simple language.
• Can make tough decisions and take responsibility for their consequences.
• Find satisfaction in enabling your colleagues to thrive.
• Have strong moderating skills to bring discussions to a successful conclusion.
• Show empathy for your colleagues as well as being able to give direct and sometimes uncomfortable feedback.
• Are a great communicator in a diverse, international, and fully remote team.
• You know that team comes first and you go second.

Not sure if you meet all requirements above? Don’t sweat it – if you think you’re the right person anyway, we’d love to hear from you!

Why you’ll love it

• Your work will contribute to helping millions of people enjoy lovely outdoor experiences.
• We’ve been a remote-working company since 2017, meaning: We are remote by default, have frameworks and systems in place, and know how to do it well.
• You can work from wherever you want, be it a beach, the mountains, your house, or anywhere else that lies in any time zone between UTC-1 and UTC+3.
• We have your costs covered for your co-working space membership or your work-from-home office setup and the latest devices and equipment to do your best work.
• You’ll become an essential part of our diverse and international team with colleagues based in 20+ countries across Europe.
• 38 paid days off (inclusive public holidays) – you are free to take those days whenever it suits you, including a well-deserved winter holiday break.
• We love seeing people grow. That’s why each team member gets €2,000 and 3 additional days to spend on professional development each year. Classes, conferences, books – your choice!

Curious about how we work?

• Core Communication time between 10 am – 3 pm (Berlin Time). We know people have different lifestyles, which is why we have flexible working hours with core time for synchronous interaction. You can organize your workday in the way that best suits you, your family, and your needs.
• We work on a project basis in cross functional teams to ensure that we collaborate on our goals, move forward smoothly with open lines of communication, and achieve results as a team.
• Every Monday morning, we have a whole-company presentation where you hear about projects across the business, inspire each other, and share great work.
• We connect in person at three whole-company gatherings each year in beautiful locations. You can check out this playlist to find out more about how we stay close while being remote.
• We use tools like Trello, Slack, Miro, Zoom, and Google Workspace on a daily basis to stay connected, collaborate easily, and manage projects.

Dive a little deeper and learn…

• More about how we work here: How We Work
• More about our recruitment process, salary and FAQs here: FAQs

We support diversity and inclusivity and welcome all prospective applicants.  We have an ongoing recruitment process (no deadlines) – if this role is online, it means it’s still open!