Staff Software Engineer (f/m/d) in Berlin

Make an Impact by:

You will spearhead the design and implementation of significant platform changes. You will set the technical bar for the team, raise the bar on how AI-assisted engineering is done at DCS, and act as a team multiplier for everyone around you. We organize expectations into Primary and Supporting areas.

• You author or sponsor design documents that achieve stakeholder alignment without escalation. You run design reviews that surface real tradeoffs, not rubber stamps. Your input on the technical roadmap is visible, justified, and acted on.
• You raise team engineering standards through direct contribution and peer influence. You earn technical authority through reasoning quality and output.
• You use AI tools as a serious engineering accelerator and you build the same capability in others.
• You apply distributed systems patterns (event-focused, CQRS, API gateway, event sourcing) with demonstrated judgment about fit.
• Written and verbal communication. You produce written artifacts (design docs, proposals, postmortems) that are clear, structured, and direct to alignment without repeated clarification rounds.
• Technical pattern judgment. You know when not to use a pattern. The Staff level requires the confidence to advocate for simplicity against organizational momentum toward complexity.
• Database and data model judgment. You apply sound judgment to data modelling, query performance, and schema migrations under load. You identify performance and migration risks before they reach production.
• Code and review quality. Your code contributions are production-ready: correct, observable, operable, maintainable. Your code reviews are substantive. You identify real risks and design issues, not style preferences.

Your Profile

• 8 years of professional software engineering experience, with clear evidence of operating at a Staff level (cross-team technical impact, ownership of significant platform-level work, mentorship of senior engineers)
• Strong polyglot foundation. Primary stack is JVM (Java and Kotlin); experience with Go or Node.js is welcome
• Deep, production-grade experience with event-focused systems. Concrete experience with Kafka is required; Flink (or comparable stream processing) is a strong plus
• Solid command of distributed systems fundamentals: idempotency, exactly-once vs at-least-once tradeoffs, backpressure, schema evolution, partitioning
• Experience designing and operating CQRS and event-sourcing patterns, and the judgment to know when not to use them
• Hands‑on experience with API gateway technologies and patterns (routing, rate limiting, auth, traffic shaping)
• Strong database judgment across relational (PostgreSQL) and non‑relational stores, including data modelling, query performance, and migrations under load
• Proven track record of steering complex, multi‑team technical projects end‑to‑end
• Effective use of AI coding tools as part of your daily workflow. We use Claude Code.
• Experience with similar tools (OpenAI Codex, opencode, Cursor and others) is fully transferable, but we want to see real fluency, not surface‑level use
• Familiarity with cloud service providers, ideally Azure
• Comfortable with container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Fluency in English; German is a plus

We Offer:

• A unique opportunity combining the energy of a scale up with the power of BMW, Mercedes Benz Mobility & bp
• Working on products & services with a high social impact
• An international team of talented people who love what they do and live a collaborative spirit
• An open minded culture with room for growth and the freedom to bring in own ideas
• Subsidized gym membership
• Subsidized office lunch benefit
• Personal development budget for your professional growth
• Monthly mobility budget
• Up to 2 days of home office in a week
• Offsite/ team events & much more and modern, sunny offices in Berlin & Munich

... and of course the classics: delicious coffee & tea, fresh fruits and an office dog friendly environment

At DCS we acknowledge the value of diversity, promote equality and challenge unfair discrimination. We strive to create an inclusive work environment, safe for anyone regardless of their gender identity, sexual orientation, abilities, ethnicity or race. We have the clear goal of driving diversity and inclusion across all dimensions and treat each applicant with the same respect and consideration.