Principal Engineer, Growth Mega Alliance (all genders)

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.

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
• Establish agentic development workflows — where specs drive AI-assisted code generation — and scale them from early adopters to standard practice
• Develop and articulate a clear point of view on how engineering teams need to evolve in skills, process, and culture

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)
• 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. 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. Partner with Intelligent Platforms, Consumer, and Operations Mega Alliances to drive shared architectural standards.

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.

What You'll Bring

• Practical, hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode) in production or near-production environments
• Deep familiarity with at least two of: AdTech / paid media infrastructure, funnel optimization, payment orchestration, CRM and lifecycle communications, or pricing and incentive optimization
• ~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
• Working knowledge of experimentation design and analysis; able to work directly with data (SQL, BI tooling)
• Fluent English. German is a bonus.