Director of Engineering, Operations Planning
About The Position
The Operations Data and Decisions Tribe at HelloFresh is responsible for driving operations planning by creating high quality, reusable data assets, data science models, and algorithmic solutions. This team has a direct impact on the customer experience and is constantly optimising for various Business KPIs. They build in-house products using modern technologies to handle a massive scale of transactions (>8.5 million active customers) and continuously improve the SDLC for fast flow and continuous delivery. As a Director of Operations Planning Engineering, you will lead engineering teams (Data Science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, & Analytics) and Staff Engineers across the mid-term planning domain, supporting their technical decision-making processes. Your responsibilities will include spearheading initiatives that traverse multiple teams and domains, such as those focused on network planning, demand planning, and production planning. Drawing upon your comprehensive understanding of the domain, you will own the planning architecture strategy and drive the long-term vision for how our planning systems should be integrated and scaled.
Requirements
- AI proficiency and advocacy. Hands-on familiarity with AI technologies and a demonstrable track record of championing their adoption — whether through AI-assisted development workflows, LLM-powered tooling, or driving team-wide GenAI-native ways of working.
- Deep Technical Expertise. Mastery of a broad range of technical skills relevant to Operations Planning — including planning systems, data science modeling, data engineering, database systems, distributed computing, and backend development frameworks. Hands-on familiarity with full stack application development.
- Systems Thinking. The ability to understand complex systems holistically, recognising how components interact and impact each other, and leveraging this to design scalable, resilient solutions in a high-throughput environment where downtime means direct revenue loss.
- Proven Leadership at Scale. 10+ years in software engineering with 4+ years managing Engineering Managers — not just individual contributors. Demonstrated ability to lead distributed teams across multiple offices, building trust and maintaining high engineering standards without daily co-location.
- Operational Excellence Mindset. Strong grounding in SRE practices — SLOs/SLIs, incident management, on-call culture, and observability tooling (Grafana or similar). Experience owning payments infrastructure in regulated, multi-market environments is a strong plus.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration. Exceptional ability to work across engineering disciplines, Product, business stakeholders, and external service providers — fostering alignment towards common goals and translating business outcomes into engineering priorities.
- Effective Communication Across Disciplines. Strong ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences, from engineers to senior business stakeholders.
- Low ego, high ownership, and a bias toward clarity over complexity.
Responsibilities
- Lead an engineering squad comprising 10-15 engineers, managing Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers across Warsaw, Berlin, & USA.
- Own the GenAI transformation — define and drive a concrete roadmap for becoming a genuinely AI-native engineering organisation: from AI-assisted development and automated incident response, to agentic workflows and LLM-powered tooling embedded in day-to-day operations.
- Own the availability and reliability of HelloFresh's planning infrastructure — drive SRE practices, incident management, SLOs/SLIs, and on-call maturity across high-throughput systems serving multiple markets.
- Set technical direction across Python, GoLang, PostgreSQL, Kafka, React, and React Native services on AWS, ensuring systems.
- Partner with Product, Operations, Marketing, and Procurement providers to align engineering priorities with business outcomes.
- Manage, coach, and develop Engineering Managers & Engineers — holding them accountable for team health, delivery, and engineering standards.
- Navigate organisational change with maturity, keeping teams focused and motivated through evolving priorities.
Benefits
- 75% off weekly HelloFresh/Chefs Plate meal kits plus 50% off weekly Factor meal boxes.
- Health and dental coverage from day one, a Health Spending Account, unlimited Headspace access, and 25% off GoodLife fitness memberships.
- Generous vacation and PTO offerings.
- A parental leave top-up program designed to support expectant parents.
- Dedicated L&D initiatives and career support, aligning with our "Learning Never Stops" value.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Manager
Education Level
No Education Listed
