Engineering Manager - Experience Above the Box (all genders)

About tonies:

tonies is the globally leading interactive audio platform for children with more than 10 million Tonieboxes and 125 million Tonies sold. The intuitive and award-winning audio system has changed the way young children play and learn independently with its child-safe, wireless, and screen-free approach. Tonieboxes have been activated in over 100 countries, the content portfolio includes around 1,400 Tonies in several languages. Since its inception, tonies has achieved significant milestones, including listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in November 2021 as well as a globally present team of over 550 dedicated professionals operating from various countries.

Joining our tonies team means being part of an inspiring mission to create innovative and meaningful experiences for children around the world. Together, we’re shaping the future of play, learning, and imagination.

You as part of tonies:

Above the box is where the magic of tonies becomes tangible: the Tonies themselves — Content, Creative, Clever — and Tonieplay. As Engineering Manager (all genders) for our Above-the-Box value stream, you lead a cross-functional team that owns these experiences end to end — from the device through App and cloud, across every Toniebox generation and every device our products will run on next.

The team is newly formed and set to grow, with a mix of internal and external engineers. Together with your Product Manager, you shape both the experiences we ship and the team that builds them, bringing joy to millions of children worldwide. Ready to help us create the future of audio play?

Your tasks and responsibilities will include:

• Team Leadership: You nurture the professional growth of your engineers and build a culture where inclusive mentorship, continuous learning, and high collaboration are the norm — across disciplines, and across internal and external team members alike.
• Building & Scaling the Team: You grow the team as our roadmap grows: shaping the profiles we hire, onboarding and integrating external engineers, and making sure critical knowledge stays with the team rather than walking out the door.
• End-to-End Ownership: You make your team genuinely accountable for its experiences — embedded, app, and cloud — rather than handing work over at team boundaries.
• Architectural Oversight: You oversee the structural integrity of the Above-the-Box implementations, ensuring a consistent user experience across multiple device generations through clean abstractions and cross-functional end-to-end ownership.
• Interfaces & Dependencies: You define the application-level APIs your team needs from our platform teams and turn cross-team dependencies into clear, testable contracts instead of coordination overhead.
• Product Sync & Strategy: You synchronise with Product Management to prioritise features and technical debt, ensuring that every engineering cycle directly fuels the overarching tonies® product vision.
• Leading Through Change: You bring the team through transitions with a clear vision, identifying what needs to improve and driving those improvements together with your engineers.
• Technical Credibility & Hands-on Depth: You stay close enough to the code to run high-impact reviews, challenge architectural decisions, and step in on critical problems — so our quality standards remain uncompromised, including for work delivered by external partners.
• Delivery Excellence: You manage the end-to-end delivery process, applying lean principles to streamline workflows and ensure stable, plannable, reliable releases for our customers.

Your Team's Responsibilities

• Designing, building, and maintaining the Above-the-Box experience — our value stream covering everything our users experience beyond the box itself:

  • Content-, Creative- and Clever Tonies

  • Tonieplay

• Delivering these experiences across the full stack, from on-device software through app and cloud services

• Specifying the abstract interfaces (APIs) delivered by our lower-level platform teams, so the team can own its experiences end to end across hardware generations

• Safeguarding quality through end-to-end ownership and test automation owned inside the team

• Partnering closely with Product Management to translate the experience roadmap into sustainable delivery

• Acting as the point of contact for Above-the-Box topics across the wider engineering organisation

What we are looking for:

• Leadership & Team Empowerment: You have experience leading engineering teams—including specialists outside your own discipline—and excel at turning complex challenges into a clear vision. You seamlessly integrate external engineers and partners to build one unified team grounded in shared standards, collective ownership, and zero second-class contributors.

• Technical Acumen & Hands-on Depth: You bring a long-standing background as a software engineer with genuine full-stack breadth — you have depth in embedded, backend, or mobile development, and enough working knowledge of the others to reason about, review, and challenge decisions across the whole stack. While your focus is on leadership and design, you can still dive into the codebase to unblock critical bottlenecks.

• Architectural Vision: You advocate for modular, flexibly extendable, loosely coupled architectures with strong cohesion — so a feature can be built once and shipped across several hardware generations without being rewritten each time.

• Strategic Product Alignment: You act as the bridge between engineering and product strategy. You translate business goals into technical reality and collaborate seamlessly across departments to keep our roadmap both ambitious and achievable.

• The Toolbox: Solid experience with software platforms and their architecture. Linux is your home ground, and Git, GitLab, and CI/CD are part of your daily workflow. Experience working with ODMs or hardware suppliers is a strong plus.

• Clean Design & Simplicity: You champion lean structures and have a knack for solving complex problems with simple, elegant solutions — in code and in organisational processes alike.

• Work Style: Your approach is defined by agility, empathy, and creativity, especially when exploring new solutions or navigating change.

• Communication & Collaboration: You communicate confidently in professional English (German is a plus) and enjoy being with your team in the office regularly.

• Last but not least: You are enthusiastic about our product and want to join us on our exciting journey!

Why tonies?

• Global Teamwork: We collaborate across departmental and country borders on our vision to bring the Toniebox into every child's room in the world.

• Come as you are: This applies not only to the dress code but also to everything else. Because only where you truly feel comfortable can you give your best.

• Mobility: Choose the option that suits you best – a Deutschlandticket (public transport ticket) for unlimited mobility, a monthly contribution for an office parking space, a leasing bicycle, or a remote work subsidy.

• Enhanced Security: Benefit from subsidies for company pension plans, occupational pension schemes, and occupational disability insurance.

• Rest & Time Off: Enjoy 30 days of paid annual leave plus three additional days off such as Rosenmontag, Christmas Eve, and New Year's Eve. After one year of employment, you can also use up to 10 "toniecation days" (unpaid leave days).

• Continuous Learning: Benefit from our internal and external training opportunities as well as an individual learning budget to continuously expand your knowledge.

• Language Learning & Relaxation: Improve your communication skills with the language learning app Babbel and find relaxation through our access to the meditation app Calm.

• Discounts: Benefit from attractive discounts on our entire range of tonies products.

Good to know:

As part of our principles, we are committed to supporting inclusion and diversity at tonies. We actively celebrate our colleagues’ different abilities, ethnicities, faith and gender. Everyone is welcome and supported in their development at all stages in their journey with us.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Sabine Schykowski
Talent Acquisition Manager