Head of Data Engineering (m/f) at Blinkist (Berlin, Germany)

This ad goes out to all those who want to find a purpose in what they’re doing and take accountability for their work.

At Blinkist, we’ve created a meaningful product that is growing fast. Our blinks – key insights from the world’s best nonfiction – inspire more than 8 million people around the globe to keep learning new, exciting things each and every day.

Why do we need you?

Our data stack has always been a core column of our business success. As Blinkist’s data grows (along with the number of users, features, and employees), the mission of setting up efficient, reliable and frictionless data feeds to fuel our operations and decisions becomes crucial.

To better support the development needs of our people and the business, we’ve recently made some structural and functional changes within our Data department. The newly formed Data Engineering Circle now needs a dedicated person to focus on solid foundations, establishing and optimizing data workflows, while providing clarity and direction to the team.

This is where you step in! We’d like you to set up, lead, and develop a team of data engineers and take data engineering at Blinkist to the next level.

What you will do?

• Work hand-in-hand with our Head of BI, Data Analysts and Scientists to translate business requirements into architecture and technologies, and ensure the team delivers high-quality solutions on time and budget.
• Proactively evaluate and update our data processes and workflows to decrease the level of dependency between the BI, Data Engineering and mission teams, in order to ensure a fast and efficient collaboration between all stakeholders.
• Drive strategy, goals and the structure of the team together with our CTO and Director of Engineering to ensure the circle meets its goals and serves its purpose.
• Lead and grow a high performing team of Data Engineers ensuring that they are being developed, mentored and challenged, acting as an advocate for them within the organization and ensuring all roles and accountabilities are clearly defined.
• Develop and maintain effective and consistent data collection solutions at scale.
• Build data pipelines, integrate them into our backend systems within AWS (Lambda, Kinesis, and Redshift), handling millions of transactions per day.
• Further build out our own event system (described here).
• Keep an eye on new releases and tech innovations, making sure we’re applying state of the art tech and up-to-date solutions that scale well.

What we believe will help you excel in this role:

• Data expertise: You’ve worked with hundreds of millions of events, funneling them through kinesis streams, sanitizing and merging them together with data from all available sources. You are able to understand Analytics, Data Science and Product requirements and translate those into actionable items for your team  to generate learnings for the business and upscale our product.
• Experience in AWS Redshift and the AWS ecosystem.
• A strong background in data engineering or software engineering.
• 2+ years of leadership experience - you’ve built and managed teams of engineers. You love developing and growing people, helping them achieve their full potential, inspiring excellence and innovation in others, while keeping in close touch with your technical-engineering self.
• Strong critical thinking and a result-driven mindset - you constantly challenge the status quo, coming up with innovative and elegant solutions to improve engineering delivery and output, driving our technology forward to stay ahead of the market.
• Strong work ethics and communication - we value transparency and open communication. We solve problems before they arise and don’t let tensions get in our way of working together towards our shared purpose. You will lead by example, embracing our values and nurturing our unique culture in the way you lead, develop and grow your team.

What’s in it for you?

At Blinkist, we offer a fantastic workplace in the heart of Berlin-Neukölln including all the benefits you’d expect – from a personalized perk system to free private language lessons. Add free lunch, a competitive salary, a personal development budget, flexible working hours, and a meaningful product on the rise, and you’ll get a first impression of why Blinkist is a great place to work at.

We got rid of classical management hierarchies and, instead, distributed authority among all colleagues. We foster a unique company culture championing self-empowerment, personal development, direct communication and mutual support. Not only do we want you to grow into this role, but we want this role to grow with you.

If we’ve captured your interest and you want to help us build the leading destination for the modern lifelong learner, apply now and let us know why you’re the perfect fit for the job!