VP/Head of Engineering (all genders)

Leipzig, München

Full-time

Permanent employee

Your mission

Full technical ownership of Rocket — reporting directly to the founders, with no layer in between

In this role you own engineering at MICE DESK — fully. There is no CTO layer above you: architecture, technology, delivery, and team are yours, and you report directly to the founders. This is a hands-on leadership role. You lead the engineering team including our AI/Data function, own the interface to Product, and are accountable for everything that ships.

Engineering, end-to-end. Architecture, system design, delivery against the roadmap, reliability, technical debt. Backend, frontend, DevOps, QA, and the AI/Data team all roll up to you. You set lightweight processes that let a small team ship fast without breaking things.
An AI-enabled engineering pipeline. We don't just build AI products — we build with AI. You make the engineering organization itself AI-native: agentic coding workflows, AI-assisted review and testing, automation of everything repetitive. A small team should ship like one three times its size — making that true is your job.
AI as a core system capability. You architect the integration of LLMs and agentic workflows into production systems: deterministic logic combined with AI-generated outputs, with real validation, fallbacks, and reliability strategies. Hotel operations run on our platform — non-determinism is no excuse for unreliability.
The team. Hire, mentor, scale. You inherit a strong small team and grow it into a high-performance engineering organization with a culture of ownership and speed. Our distributed hiring strategy across multiple locations is yours as well.
Product and business alignment. You work directly with the founders and Product. You challenge requirements, simplify complexity, and connect engineering work to outcomes: revenue, automation, customer impact. As we enter the US market, engineering has to keep pace with enterprise-scale customers on two continents.

What success looks like:

6 months: Delivery is predictable, the AI-enabled dev pipeline is running, and the team has grown with A-players you hired.
12 months: The platform scales with US enterprise customers, core systems are reliable and observable, and engineering is a competitive advantage — not a bottleneck.

Honestly: This is full accountability with no net above it. No CTO layer to make or catch decisions — the architecture, the team, and everything that ships are yours. If you want a role where someone above you sets direction, this isn't it. If you want exactly that ownership, it is.

Your profile

10+ years of software engineering, 5+ in an engineering leadership role at high-growth product companies.
Strong hands-on backend or full-stack background — you can still go deep.
Proven experience scaling engineering teams at growing startups.
Strong architecture expertise: APIs, distributed systems, event-driven design, cloud.
LLM / agentic AI systems in production — and genuine conviction that engineering itself should be AI-assisted.
Product mindset: you connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
Comfortable with ambiguity, speed, and full accountability.

Nice to have, not required: Background in hospitality tech, CRM, PMS, or revenue management. Enterprise integration experience (Salesforce, Oracle OPERA Cloud, Microsoft Graph API). Experience leading distributed, international teams.

Why us?

We are the technology company rethinking group and event sales in hospitality. What runs today through inboxes, spreadsheets and phone calls, our platform Rocket turns into one continuous, AI-supported process — from the first enquiry to the signed contract. European hotel groups already run their group sales on it.
What that means for you: you work with AI, not despite it. People who join us give feedback that shapes product decisions — and sooner or later come to understand why one prompt works better than another.
And because we are growing fast, a lot here is still taking shape. Sometimes the honest answer is “we’re still building that.” That is exactly where the opportunity lies: you will find open space rather than finished structures, and what you build here will carry your signature.

What we offer

Work with real AI technology at international level — not as a pilot project, but as our business model.
Genuine room to shape things. Your ideas do not land in a suggestion box; they land in the next iteration.
A short path to the management team. Decisions take days, not committee rounds.
Growth you are part of. We are building the company’s next chapter — with roles, responsibility and prospects that did not exist a year ago.
Leipzig as your primary base, with regular time in the office and flexible remote work. Hybrid models are everyday practice here, not the exception.
Permanent contract, full-time.
Performance bonuses for demonstrable results.
Multi-day team events in places that are actually fun.

Our hiring process

Intro interview — we get to know each other, and you learn where we stand and where we are heading.
Leadership study or technical study, depending on the role — a real problem from our day-to-day that we work through together.
Founder interview

About us

MICE DESK is the leading technology partner in global group and convention sales – and is developing the first agentic operating system for the hospitality industry.
Our core product, Rocket, automates the entire group and convention sales process: from analysing enquiries and checking availability to integrating revenue data, creating quotes and finalising contracts. What currently takes hotels an average of two hours, Rocket completes in minutes.

What makes us unique: We don’t just build the platform. Where required, we also support our clients through a dedicated booking centre – our MICE DESK Crew – which provides hotels with direct support from experienced MICE professionals. AI and people working as a true partnership – not as a compromise.