Senior Software Engineer, Flink
Discovery
Grocery delivery service
Open for applications
Grocery delivery service
1001+ employees
Open for applications
1001+ employees
Company mission
To deliver organic fresh fruit, vegetables, and other groceries directly to the homes of customers, within 10 minutes, at supermarket prices.
Role
Who you are
- Extensive experience in backend software engineering, with a proven track record of designing, building, and maintaining complex, scalable, and business-critical systems
- Deep proficiency in GoLang and/or Kotlin (preferably with the Spring framework)
- Strong, hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration technologies, particularly Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD practices (we use ArgoCD)
- Demonstrable experience with modern observability stacks and a data-driven approach to system health and performance (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana)
- A high level of expertise in a particular platform, technology, or product category (e.g., search systems, distributed computing, ad-serving platforms) that brings unique business value
- Proven ability to lead projects, mentor engineers, and drive technical strategy within a team or domain
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
- AI-assisted development experience and enthusiasm, leveraging coding agents like GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Claude Code, or similar tools is a significant plus
What the job involves
- In your role as a Senior Backend Engineer - Discovery (m/f/d), you will be at the very core of our users' journey, architecting the future of how millions of customers find, explore, and engage with our vast product catalog
- This is not just a coding role; you will be a technical leader, strategist, and role model, instrumental in pioneering our world-class Search platform and our cutting-edge Retail Media and Ad-Tech capabilities
- Working at the exciting intersection of high-performance backend engineering and applied science, you will define technical direction, tackle ambiguous problems, and build resilient, scalable systems in close collaboration with our Data Science teams to integrate sophisticated Machine Learning models into our products
- Define Technical Vision: Define and drive the 6-12 month technical vision and strategy for your engineering team, translating complex business goals into a concrete technical roadmap
- Architect & Build: Design, develop, and operate high-throughput, low-latency backend services using GoLang and Kotlin (Spring), deployed on Kubernetes
- Lead & Influence: Act as a strong technical leader within your team and a key influencer across the wider engineering organization. You will mentor other engineers, lead architectural discussions, and make pragmatic trade-offs to deliver customer value effectively
- Solve Ambiguous Problems: Tackle challenging, open-ended problems in partnership with senior peers and product managers. You will be responsible for defining the 'what,' the 'how,' and the 'when,' breaking down complexity into actionable plans
- Drive Cross-Team Impact: Lead and contribute to initiatives that span multiple engineering teams, ensuring seamless execution and delivery with minimal guidance
- Innovate & De-risk: Champion a culture of experimentation by regularly using proofs of concept and low-cost experiments to validate architectural choices, improve planning, and mitigate risks
- Collaborate Deeply: Work hand-in-hand with Product Managers, Data Scientists, and other stakeholders to shape product decisions and integrate cutting-edge ML models into our production systems
Our take
Online grocery delivery services in Europe range from early supermarket-specific services to the more recent success of mobile food-ordering applications. However despite their proliferation grocery delivery services still face long waiting lists and logistic bottlenecks, with faster solutions coming with a compromise on the range and quality of products.
Flink provides an online website and mobile application for the delivery of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other organic-quality groceries to European homes. The company provides its services to over 100 different European cities across Germany,and the Netherlands and claims that its grocery deliveries are provided at supermarket prices within 10 minutes of ordering.
Flink is one of the few remaining independent grocery delivery startups in Europe, with most of the others either having been acquired or shut down. German rival Gorillas for instance ate through its initial investments and was taken over in 2022. Flink has been playing a more conservative strategy, aiming for more steady growth, but had to receive a fresh investment round of 100 million euros in 2024 to help it outlast competitors. Rumors of a potential merger with competitor companies indicate the lengths that Flink is going to maintain its dominance in a market that, at present, is suffering from lower demand and higher costs.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
346% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Sep 2024
$122.3m
LATE VC
Apr 2024
$117.8m
LATE VC
Total funding: $1.5bn
Company HQ
Mitte, Berlin, Germany
Leadership
Oliver Merkel
(Co-Founder & Managing DIrector)Partner at Bain & Company. Co-founded Flink in December 2020.
Julian Dames
(Co-Founder & Managing Director)Consultant at Bain & Company before founding foodora, where they served as MD and Global CMO. Also served as CMO at Rappi.
Christoph Cordes
(Co-Founder & Managing Director)Began career at Adidas before becoming Manager Director at fashion4home GmbH.
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