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, HTMX, ReScript, 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-vision pipelines on production traffic.
• The stability of an international group (UniSea) combined with the speed and ownership of a startup.
• Direct exposure to the CTO and CEO; in the room for the calls that matter.
• A diverse, international team of maritime experts, engineers, and commercial talent.
• Central Berlin office at Münzstraße (Mitte).
• Competitive salary, meaningful equity, modern equipment.
• Regular team events, offsites, and a culture that takes itself seriously without being stiff.

We would love to hear from you. Send us your CV plus a short paragraph telling us: (a) the hardest team-management call you have made, (b) a project where you prototyped something and handed it off, and (c) an engineer who grew under you and what they are doing now.

Our process is fast and respectful of your time: an intro call with the VP Engineering or CTO, a deep technical conversation with the CTO, two team conversations with senior engineers, and a final chat with the CEO. You will hear back from us within a few days at every stage.