ZEAL Network SE is a dynamic, international group of companies that has been creating exciting and innovative lottery experiences for over 20 years. As Germany’s largest provider of online lotteries through our brands LOTTO24 and Tipp24, and a trusted partner of Spain’s ONCE, the second-largest national lottery, we’re shaping the future of the lottery industry. We are passionate about driving innovation, as demonstrated by our newest brands, Freiheit+ and Traumhausverlosung, which bring fresh and exciting dreams to life. Additionally, through ZEAL Ventures, we invest in inspiring e-commerce start-ups like Omaze and DAYMADE, fueling fresh ideas and opportunities.

Our team of 350+ professionals from diverse backgrounds is united by a visionary mindset, a passion for collaboration, and a commitment to inspire dreams. At ZEAL, we empower our people to think ambitiously and work together toward a shared purpose: helping people imagine and achieve their aspirations.

As our Engineering Team Lead (f/m/d), you combine strong people leadership with hands-on technical expertise to guide and grow a high-performing team. Your team owns its domain and sits at the heart of Zeal's B2B core platform: its customers are the core platform teams themselves, whom you enable with reliable, scalable shared services.

Your tasks:

• You lead a platform-focused engineering team responsible for building reliable, scalable shared services that enable all product teams
• Hire, Build and lead a team of 2 engineers: Hire, develop, and grow a high-performing team, fostering an ownership-driven and reliability-focused engineering culture
• Lead technically and strategically, define and drive architectural decisions together with your team
• Code as part of the team: While guiding architecture and strategy, you’ll regularly write code, contribute to features, and help solve complex technical challenges together with your team
• Champion the effective use of AI in your team's engineering workflows (e.g. AI-assisted development and tooling) and explore opportunities to apply AI within the platform's capabilities
• Establish and drive reliability practices: Design and implement monkey testing and load testing strategies to proactively identify weaknesses and continuously improve platform resilience and stability
• Own prioritization and backlog: Balance reliability, tech debt, operational, and business demands with stakeholders across Core, Product, and Platform, keeping a transparent roadmap focused on the highest-value work.
• Own core technical services: Take end-to-end ownership of internally developed platform services such as Auth Service, API Gateway, ensuring they are scalable, reliable, and easy to consume
• Act as the bridge between domains: Collaborate closely with Core domain teams and the Platform team to understand needs, identify gaps, and provide efficient, reusable technical solutions
• Enable data and event flows: Own and evolve solutions core technical tracking infrastructure, ensuring reliable and scalable event collection and forwarding to downstream systems
• Deliver secure, robust and maintainable technical solutions while focusing on great customer experiences and business needs

What you offer us:

• Proven people leadership skills with the ability to grow teams from early stage to high performance
• Strong hands-on engineering background in Kotlin/Spring Boot, Mongo/PostgresDB ideally paired with DevOps experience
• Experience designing and operating reliable, scalable distributed systems, including resilience patterns and failure handling
• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, and performance testing including load/monkey testing
• Experience building and evolving internal platform services and APIs that are easy for other teams to consume
• “You build it, you run it” mindset with hands-on experience running services in Kubernetes-based environme