Principal Engineer

The Role

The Growth Mega Alliance (GMA) builds the platforms that power how HelloFresh acquires, converts, and retains customers across 18 markets and multiple brands, across five pillars: AdTech, Conversions, Payments, Communications, and Customer Value Optimization (CVO).

As Principal Engineer, you are the technical visionary for these platforms. You define architectural direction across all five pillars, lead the most consequential cross-cutting initiatives, and raise the technical bar for the entire organization. This is a hands-on leadership role - you code, review, and design alongside the senior and staff engineers who look to you as the technical lead.

What You'll Do

GenAI & Agentic Engineering Leadership

• Own GMA's GenAI strategy: identify the highest-leverage opportunities across all five pillars where AI/ML unlocks step-change outcomes, for both engineering productivity and customer-facing capabilities.
• Establish agentic development workflows — where specs drive AI-assisted code generation — and scale them from early adopters to standard practice. Build the guardrails and reference architectures that enable squads to work AI-natively.
• Develop and articulate a clear point of view on how engineering teams need to evolve in skills, process, and culture to realize the gains that agentic tools make possible.

Growth Platform Architecture

• Own the long-term technical architecture across GMA's five pillars: real-time personalization, experimentation at scale, AI/ML-driven automation, and cross-pillar data integrity.
• Lead the most complex architectural decisions (shared identity schemas, experiment assignment, AdTech-to-Conversions signal loops, payment authorization flows) and drive migrations with large impact.
• Ensure GMA platforms integrate cleanly with internal infrastructure and meet reliability, latency, and observability requirements at a global scale. 

Experimentation & Personalization

• Define GMA's experimentation strategy and execution framework to optimize experimentation-based decision-making at scale.
• Own the data path from customer event to business decision: instrumentation standards, identity resolution, attribution windows, and signal quality.

Technical Strategy & Cross-Alliance Collaboration

• Define GMA's multi-year technical vision and communicate it with the precision engineers need and the clarity executives can act on. Represent GMA in company-wide programs.
• Partner with Intelligent Platforms, Consumer, and Operations Mega Alliances to drive shared architectural standards and prevent fragmentation.

Mentorship & Engineering Culture

• Coach and grow Staff and Senior Engineers across all five pillars. Foster engineering excellence through rigorous design review, strong observability practice, and honest post-incident learning.
• Champion AI-native development workflows, TDD, DDD, and DevSecOps. Set the written communication standard through your design docs and architectural decision records.

What You'll Bring

GenAI & Agentic Engineering

• Practical, hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode) in production or near-production environments — not just experimentation.
• Experience integrating GenAI into customer-facing products or internal business processes at scale, with a clear point of view on the team and cultural changes required to realize the productivity gains.

Growth Domain Expertise

• Deep familiarity with at least two of: AdTech / paid media infrastructure, funnel optimization, payment orchestration, CRM and lifecycle communications, or pricing and incentive optimization.
• Fluent in growth domain constraints: PSP behavior, consent and privacy requirements across markets, deliverability limits, attribution windows, and incrementality measurement. Experience in a multi-market subscription or e-commerce business preferred.

Technical Depth

• ~10+ years in software engineering, with ~5+ years at principal level in a high-growth, cloud-native environment.
• Expert in distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven patterns (Kafka). Deep AWS experience. Strong proficiency in Go, Kotlin, Python, or TypeScript.
• Track record of designing and operating large-scale, multi-region systems. Comfortable doing hands-on architectural reviews and solving critical bottlenecks directly.
• Working knowledge of experimentation design and analysis; able to work directly with data (SQL, BI tooling) and trace the full signal chain from instrumentation to business metric.

Ways of Working

• Exceptional written communication — your documents make complexity smaller, not larger.
• Able to influence without authority; direct, low-ego, and comfortable disagreeing with senior stakeholders while keeping the relationship intact.
• Fluent English. German is a bonus.

What Success Looks Like

3 months — You have mapped GMA's critical architectural dependencies and GenAI opportunities, conducted design reviews across multiple pillars, and established a point of view on the highest-leverage technical bets for the year.

6 months — Your architectural direction is reflected in roadmaps. GMA's first AI-native workflows are in production. At least one cross-pillar initiative is running under your technical ownership with clear instrumentation.

12 months — GMA's platforms are measurably more scalable, observable, and AI-capable. Engineering standards are set and followed. You are the person leaders across HelloTech bring their hardest growth-engineering problems to.

Why Work With Us

• Make an Impact: GMA's platforms touch every customer HelloFresh acquires and every euro it collects. Your decisions move top-line numbers at a company that has changed the way millions of people eat.
• Real Scope: You own technical direction, make consequential architectural calls, and ship things that matter — at a scale that makes the problems genuinely hard.
• AI at the Frontier: You will have the mandate, resources, and organizational support to lead AI-native engineering transformation — not advocate for it from the sidelines.
• Direct Access: You work daily with engineering, product, and business leadership, with the visibility and accountability that implies.
• Learn & Grow: Annual learning budget, HelloFresh Academy, and internal mobility across a large, technically ambitious engineering organization.