Tech Lead (m/f/d)

Kaiko Systems is a Berlin-based maritime technology company making global shipping safer and smarter. Our AI-powered platform helps shipping companies digitalize vessel inspections, compliance, and fleet health, and is trusted by 40+ customers worldwide. In 2026 we joined forces with UniSea, a leading Norwegian maritime software provider, combining startup pace with the strength of an international group.

We are now looking for a Tech Lead to run our Berlin engineering team day-to-day: a hands-on engineer who prototypes the hard problems, allocates the right people to the right work, mentors the team, and turns architectural direction from our CTO and VP Engineering into a plan the team can execute on. You will report directly to the CTO.

Tasks

• Prototype the hard problems yourself. When product direction is unclear, you write the spike: small, ugly, fast, built to surface the real complexity. You hand the load-bearing core to the team, stay in the loop while they scale it, and defend the architectural choices that came out of the prototype.
• Run the team day-to-day: standups, 1:1s, performance conversations, hiring loops, the engineering side of the on-call rotation. You set the cadence and the cadence holds.
• Allocate engineers to projects based on real knowledge of their strengths, weaknesses, and where they need to grow. You make those calls and you defend them.
• Mentor and grow people. Give hard feedback the day it is relevant, not at review season. Spot the engineer who is stuck and unstuck them.
• Extract architectural guidance from the CTO and VP Engineering and turn it into a plan the team can execute on. Architectural decisions sit with them; landing those decisions sits with you.
• Stay hands-on: write production code, review the hard MRs, defend simplicity over premature abstraction, push back on shipping blockers.
• Continuously improve how we work — engineering process, tools, standards — as we grow within the UniSea Group.

Requirements

• 2–5+ years leading or managing a team of engineers; you have hired, mentored, given hard feedback, and made calls that did not work and learned from them. Depth matters more than years.
• Engineer first in your identity. You enjoy the code, you read other people's code, and you have strong, defendable opinions on language and framework choice, testing posture, and abstraction level.
• Genuinely hands-on. Strong on at least one of: Python / Django, TypeScript / React, infra (Docker / Postgres / cloud). Comfortable reading the others. You can still write production code today.
• Earned soft skills. You can disagree with senior people and have them think more of you afterward. You can give an engineer feedback that lands. You can read a room.
• Real track record of growing people. You can name engineers who grew under you, what they grew into, and what you did to help.
• Resource-allocation instinct based on real knowledge of people, not a spreadsheet.
• Rapid-prototyping reflex. When you do not know how hard a piece of work is, your instinct is to write code, not to schedule a meeting.
• Production-grade taste. You know the difference between a spike and a shippable system, and you build prototypes that can grow into the real thing without a full rewrite.
• Fluent English. German is not required.
• Based in Berlin or willing to relocate. Flexible on office attendance, but close enough that "hey, let's meet tomorrow" actually works.

Nice to have

• Maritime, logistics, or other physical-world-meets-software domains.
• Computer-vision or LLM-agent product experience.
• Experience at profitable or capital-efficient companies; we are not a "raise and burn" shop.

Benefits

• Real ownership of a ~10-engineer team shipping to global shipping operators.
• A codebase that does serious work: AI on the customer path, offline PWA syncing event-sourced state from on-vessel installations, computer-