Engineering Manager - Ads Backend

Zattoo, a pioneer in TV streaming and the world's first certified climate-neutral provider, is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead their Ads Backend team. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on a business-critical area with direct revenue impact.

About Zattoo

Founded in 2005, Zattoo pioneered Europe's first TV streaming service and is now the world's first certified climate-neutral TV streaming provider. Serving several million users across three countries with over 230 colleagues from 47 nationalities, Zattoo is a collaborative, international, and inclusive employer.

The Role

As an Engineering Manager for the Ads Backend team, you will enable your team to do their best work by being approachable, a good listener, and a strong facilitator. You will also bring your own ideas for improving architecture and extending system capabilities. This is a hands-on leadership role requiring you to act as a technical lead, dive into code and architecture when necessary, and set direction by example.

The Ads Backend Team

This team owns Zattoo's in-house Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) solution, managing the entire ad pipeline from ad selection to impression tracking. The team collaborates closely with other video platform teams (Ingest & Storage, Streaming & CDN, Playback) and commercial stakeholders. A major re-architecture of the SSAI solution is a key upcoming challenge for the team.

What You'll Do

• Lead the Ads Backend team, both organizationally and technically.
• Own the technical vision and architecture of the SSAI platform with senior developers.
• Contribute hands-on as a technical lead: review designs, set standards by example, and step into critical code when needed.
• Own the end-to-end development process and operational excellence for revenue-impacting services.
• Help shape the technical direction of Zattoo's broader video platform in collaboration with other video teams and Principal Engineers.
• Drive cross-team initiatives spanning multiple video teams.
• Represent the team to stakeholders.
• Directly manage 2-4 engineers and lead hiring efforts.
• Grow, develop, and retain engineering talent.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of experience leading engineering teams.
• Strong, current hands-on engineering skills: ability to design, build, review production code, and act as a technical lead.
• Proficiency in C++/Go.
• Experience building highly available, scalable services and APIs.
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, message queues (e.g., Kafka), and non-relational databases (e.g., Scylla).
• A fundamental understanding and practice of testing in software development.
• Fluent English (written and verbal).
• Experience with advertising technology platforms, ad serving, and dynamic ad insertion (DAI/SSAI).
• Broad experience across the video pipeline (ingest, transcoding, packaging, DRM, streaming, playback).

Why Join Us?

• Reward: Strong, market-competitive salary.
• Recharge: 30 days of vacation plus public holidays.
• Regulate: Trust-based flexible working hours and the option for remote work worldwide for up to 8 weeks per year.
• Sharing: Free access to Zattoo streaming service.
• Developing: Personal development budget, German classes, and Zattoo all-company hack days.
• Inclusive: A fun, engaged, and diverse team of 47 nationalities.
• Healthy: Health checks, mental wellbeing support, team sports.
• Responsible: Carbon neutral operations, active Green team, discounted BVG tickets, free bike rentals.
• Sociable: Regular social events, including fireside chats, lunches, an in-house bar, BBQs, monthly socials, summer party, and an annual off-site event.

Zattoo is committed to diversity and equal opportunities, encouraging applications from all backgrounds.