Lead Engineer (AI-First) (m/w/d) 100%

HEAD OF ENGINEERING Zurich, hybrid DEPT® is a Growth Invention company built to help the world’s most ambitious brands grow faster. Operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, our 4,000+ specialists deliver growth invention services across Brand & Media, Experience, Commerce, CRM, and Technology & Data. We’re 50|50 tech and marketing, partner-led, and first to move. Clients include Google, Lufthansa, Meta, eBay, and OpenAI. We have been certified B Corp and Climate Neutral since 2021. JOB PURPOSE This role is part of our Experience & Engineering team in Germany. We combine technology and experience design to create emotive yet conversion-focused ideas, products, and campaigns at scale and speed. Our specialty is digital experiences and communication that change perceptions and shape new behaviours to make a difference in the market. In this key leadership position, you are responsible for the strategic direction and growth of our Engineering teams. You will lead a team of approximately 7-9 professionals, including Team Leads and Senior Engineers. Your focus shifts from writing code to building systems: you will optimize processes, develop the next generation of leaders, and actively drive the cultural change toward AI-driven development. WHAT YOU’LL DO: * Leadership of Leaders: You lead, coach, and mentor Team Leads and Senior Engineers. You own their career paths and empower them to lead their own sub-teams to excellence. * AI Change Management: You define the roadmap for integrating Artificial Intelligence into the daily engineering lifecycle (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Agentic Workflows). You act as a change agent, transforming our workflows for maximum efficiency and innovation. * Operational Excellence: You take full ownership of your department's operational performance (resource planning, budget monitoring, utilization) and ensure a profitable and scalable engineering organization. * Strategic Partnering: You work closely with Directors and VPs to sharpen DEPT®’s technological vision in the DACH region and act as a high-level technical sparring partner for our key accounts. * Cultural Stewardship: You foster an inclusive, motivating, high-performance culture and establish modern department rituals that promote knowledge sharing and innovation. WHAT YOU BRING: * Proven People Manager: You have a track record of leading teams in a "manager-of-managers" structure or significant experience leading larger engineering departments. * Change Agent: You are passionate about the potential of AI in the software lifecycle and have a clear vision of how modern engineering organizations must evolve. * Frontend Background: You possess a deep technical history in frontend development, allowing you to validate architectural decisions and act as a mentor on eye-level. * Business Acumen: You understand the economic drivers of an agency or consultancy and can translate KPIs into actionable success. * Communication: You are a confident communicator in both German and English, able to present complex technical topics to both stakeholders and clients. WE OFFER: * Flexible, hybrid working policy (2 days from the office, depending on location); * 25 days holiday with the opportunity to take unpaid leave; * Flexible health budget and Wellness & personal day.  * Learning & development budget. * Referral bonus program. * Occasional breakfast & lunch at the office, Smoothie Tuesday. * Stay happy and healthy with a contribution to your health through the OpenUp platform. * You can choose to work from the spacious and barrier-free location in Zurich; in Bern you can expect a small but nice and fully equipped office where you can hit the keys in peace. * Social events, plenty of opportunities to connect with colleagues through organised activities and celebrations. * A reputation for doing good. DEPT® has been a Certified B Corp® since 2021 and named ‘Agency of the Year’ at both The Lovies and The Webby Awards. * Awesome clients. Whether big or small, local or global — at DEPT® you’ll get the opportunity to work with clients of all sizes and across all industries. And we celebrate all of our successes together! * The opportunity for possibility. We want to enable you to do what you do best and help you develop your skills further with training, development and certifications. * Global annual DEPT® Cares Month in which employees come together and donate their skills to support local charities. WHY DEPT®? We are a Growth Invention company built to help the world’s most ambitious brands grow faster. Operating at the intersection of technology and marketing, we create what is next by pioneering ideas, acting fast, and moving further because standing still just is not in our DNA. We are drawn to people who stay curious, move with intent, and never stop inventing. Our culture runs on three values: better together, relentlessly curious, and get sh*t done. It is how we work, how we grow, and how we make things that matter. At DEPT®, you will find the freedom to explore, the space to collaborate, and the trust to make a real impact for our clients, for each other, and for the world we are helping to build. DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION  At DEPT®, we take pride in creating an inclusive workplace where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive. We actively seek to recruit, develop, nurture, and retain talented individuals from diverse backgrounds, with varying skills and perspectives. Not sure you meet all qualifications? Apply, and let us decide! Research shows that women and members of underrepresented groups tend not to apply for jobs when they think they may not meet every requirement, when in fact they do. We believe in giving everyone a fair chance to shine. We also encourage you to reach out to us and discuss any reasonable adjustments we can make to support you throughout the recruitment process and your time with us. Want to know more about our dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion? Check out our efforts here.

P-1127 At Databricks, we are obsessed with enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems, from security threat detection to cancer drug development. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform, so our customers can focus on the high value challenges that are central to their own missions. Our engineering teams build highly technical products that fulfill real, important needs in the world. We develop and operate one of the largest scale software platforms. The fleet consists of millions of virtual machines, generating terabytes of logs and processing exabytes of data per day. At our scale, we regularly observe cloud hardware, network, and operating system faults, and our software must gracefully shield our customers from any of the above. The Delta DML team owns the core write-path operations for Delta Lake, the open-source storage layer behind the Databricks Lakehouse. Our mission is to deliver industry-leading performance and a seamless user experience at massive scale, with most data written in Databricks flowing through our platform.  We drive performance innovations like Low Shuffle Merge and Deletion Vectors and actively contribute to open source efforts to unify Delta and Iceberg formats. We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Staff Software Engineer to join our backend team. In this role, you will be instrumental in designing, developing, and maintaining robust backend systems that power Databricks workspaces. You will build the next-generation platform for serving workspace assets, ensuring high QPS, low latency, reliable, and performant systems, proactively addressing the future growth challenges. Additionally, as a senior member of the team, you will provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to junior engineers, contributing to the overall improvement of team coding practices and system designs. The Impact you will have: * Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering. * Low level systems debugging, performance measurement, and optimization on large production clusters. * Build architecture design, influence product roadmap, and take ownership and responsibility over new projects. * Introduce tools to allow greater automation and operability of services. * Use your deep experience to help prevent and investigate production issues. * Plan and lead complicated technical projects that work with several teams within the company. * Contribute as a technical team lead by mentoring others, lead sprint planning, delegating work and assignments to team members and participate in project planning. What we look for: * 15+ years industry experience building and supporting large-scale distributed systems. * Comfortable working towards a multi-year vision with incremental deliverables. * Motivated by delivering customer value and impact. * Strong foundation in algorithms and data structures and their real-world use cases. * Experience driving company initiatives towards customer satisfaction. * BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related majors, or equivalent experience.   About Databricks Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratize data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Benefits At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region click here. Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion At Databricks, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can excel. We take great care to ensure that our hiring practices are inclusive and meet equal employment opportunity standards. Individuals looking for employment at Databricks are considered without regard to age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other protected characteristics. Compliance If access to export-controlled technology or source code is required for performance of job duties, it is within Employer's discretion whether to apply for a U.S. government license for such positions, and Employer may decline to proceed with an applicant on this basis alone.