Engineering Lead

Mission

Founded in 2024 by Lukas Zörner and Anil Can Baykal, Integral set out to redefine how accounting, taxation and payroll works for SMEs in Europe, starting with Germany. The company is backed by General Catalyst, Cherry Ventures, Puzzle Ventures and entrepreneurs across Europe.

As our Engineering Lead, you will help define our tech stack and shape our engineering culture. This role involves frequent context switching across multiple domains, technologies, and business problems. In a given week, you may move between infrastructure, backend systems, integrations, AI initiatives, frontend work, and discussions with product stakeholders.

Success in this role requires comfort with ambiguity, strong prioritization skills, and a willingness to take ownership from problem definition through production deployment and ongoing support.

You will work alongside experienced engineers in a small, high-impact team that takes pride in crafting quality solutions and learning together. This role is onsite at our Berlin office.

Core responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy across the entire technology stack: from backend services and infrastructure to frontend development; build, test, and ship solutions based on evolving business requirements without sacrificing quality

• Take end-to-end ownership of architectural decisions from initial design through to implementation; collaborate with the senior team to refine solutions and ensure they meet real business objectives

• Maintain detailed documentation of technical decisions, processes, and system architecture; foster transparency and continuity by sharing insights clearly and consistently across the team

• Work directly with the founding engineering team on the core platform that powers Integral's accounting, payroll, and tax services for thousands of SMEs across Germany.

What makes this role special

• You are joining a small, senior team where your decisions shape the architecture, not just a ticket in a backlog

• Direct collaboration with the CTO & Co-Founder from day one

• High ownership: you ship, you learn, you improve

• Your work has immediate, visible impact on a product used by SME founders who rely on Integral for their financial operations

• The engineering culture is yours to help define.

Your profile

Your Experience & Mindset

• 8 to 10+ years of professional experience in software engineering with a strong track record of building and shipping in startup or scaleup environments

• Experience across multiple companies and environments; you have seen different architecture patterns, made the mistakes, and know what actually works

• Staff, Principal, or Senior Engineer background where building and owning was the main focus, not coordinating or managing

• Proficiency across a broad technical background with a strong foundation in system design and architecture

• Strong command of at least two of the following: Java/Kotlin, JavaScript/TypeScript, React/React Native, Python

• Expertise in architectural decision-making: you can design systems that balance complexity with long-term maintainability

• Autonomous and pragmatic: you frame problems independently, design solutions, and execute without needing extensive support from other teams

• Strong written communication: you write detailed technical documentation and decision rationale as a default, not an afterthought

• Focused execution: you thrive in a hands-on role and are energised by practical outcomes, not by building a team around you.

Preferred Experience

• Experience building in regulated or compliance-heavy domains

• Familiarity with German accounting, payroll, or tax systems is a plus but not required

• Experience integrating LLMs or AI capabilities into production systems.

The process

We move fast. With the right candidate, the full process takes less than 10 days.

1. Intro call with our Talent Acquisition Lead

2. Technical deep-dive with our CTO and founding engineering team

3. On-site in Berlin: meet the team and work through a real engineering problem together

4. Reference call

Our offer

• Above-market salary

• Direct line to the Founders - no filter, no queue, no committee

• Total autonomy on what you build; we measure hours saved

• The best tools, no questions asked: Claude Max, Cursor, OpenAI, whatever ships next week

• Internal tools and resources purpose-built to support agentic AI development at scale - read about how we work at engineering.integral.de

• 28 vacation days per year with December 24th and 31st each counting as half days

• Either Urban Sports Club membership, coupons via Hrmony or Deutschland Ticket, your choice

• Laptop of your choice: MacBook or Windows Pro

• Company pension plan (betriebliche Altersvorsorge)

• Modern office in the heart of Berlin Prenzlauer Berg, steps away from Mauerpark

• Fully onsite at our Berlin office: we believe the best work happens when sharp people are in the same room

• Weekly team lunches provided by us, office BBQs and a dinner budget for late office nights past 8pm

• A team of 50+ (and growing!) ambitious, diverse people learning and building together.

• The opportunity of a decade to build a category-defining AI-native services leader

We value diversity and hire people based on their abilities and capabilities to succeed in this role. We welcome people of every background, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability status, political belief or marital status.