Technical Leader

Grape Up is a consulting & technology company, helping enterprises create the most important applications by leveraging AI & cloud-native technologies and modern ways of delivering software.

About Grape Up

Grape Up is a consulting & technology company that helps enterprises build and modernize their most critical applications, combining cloud-native engineering with applied AI.

We specialize in connected vehicle platforms and software-defined vehicle architectures for premium automotive manufacturers — systems that process telemetry from fleets of hundreds of thousands of vehicles in production. We also work across aviation and manufacturing, applying the same cloud-native engineering approach to mission-critical, regulated systems.

Alongside automotive, we run large-scale legacy modernization programs for mission-critical enterprise systems, increasingly powered by our in-house GenAI/agentic platform - used for code transformation, documentation generation, and test generation on multi-million-line codebases.

Responsibilities

• You'll take a new engagement from a blank page - no existing codebase, a loosely defined problem - and turn it into a solid, production-grade platform.

• Own end-to-end technical architecture for new client engagements - from initial discovery and technology selection through PoC, MVP, and production rollout.

• Act as the primary technical counterpart for the client: translate business goals into an actual technical design and run technical workshops to walk stakeholders through it.

• Proactively surface risks, technical debt, and better alternatives

• Lead and mentor cross-functional engineering teams: set technical direction, review key design decisions, and raise the technical bar without becoming a bottleneck.

• Contribute to presales and scoping: effort estimation, solution outlines, and technical input into commercial proposals - including presenting the architectural/technical part directly to prospective clients.

• Stay hands-on where it matters - critical prototypes, spikes, and architecturally significant code - rather than operating purely at the whiteboard level.

Requirements

Experience & Technical

• Master’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field

• 8+ years of commercial software engineering experience, including at least 3 years designing architecture for systems that reached production - not only participating in design as a senior IC.

• Strong hands-on background in Java or Kotlin (Spring / Spring Boot) proven on enterprise-scale microservice systems: security, scalability, resilience, async communication.

• Practical production experience with at least one public cloud (AWS preferred; Azure or GCP acceptable), including containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent).

• Comfort with distributed-systems building blocks: messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or MQTT), REST/gRPC/GraphQL APIs, CI/CD pipelines.

• Hands-on frontend coding ability: able to personally ship production features in React and TypeScript, not just review or advise on frontend architecture.

• A track record of owning at least one greenfield build or major re-architecture - able to walk through the trade-offs made and why, not just the patterns used.

• Experience leading or mentoring engineers formally or informally (tech lead, team lead, or similar) - this role will set direction for other developers.

• Very good spoken and written English (C1) - this role runs client meetings independently, often with non-Polish stakeholders.

Soft Skills

• Proactivity and ownership: propose solutions and take responsibility for outcomes, rather than waiting for tasks to be assigned.

• Strong presentation skills - able to present the technical/architectural part of a solution as part of client offer presentations and lead technical workshops with client stakeholders.

• Influence without authority: able to push back on a client or a team decision with a well-reasoned alternative and get buy-in for it.

• Business fluency: genuinely comfortable translating technical concepts into business language and building real relationships with client stakeholders

Nice to have

• Hands-on exposure to GenAI/LLM tooling — RAG-based systems, agentic workflows, prompt engineering, or AI-assisted code modernization.

• Experience in the automotive, connected-vehicle, or IoT domain (telemetry pipelines, digital twin, software-defined vehicle) - directly relevant to our current project mix.

• Additional languages beyond Java/Kotlin - Python, Go, or Rust.

• Experience with data platforms and pipelines (e.g., Databricks, Kafka Streams, ETL) or systems ingesting high-volume device/fleet data.

• Prior consulting or professional-services background - comfortable with ambiguity and switching context across concurrent engagements.

• Cloud architecture certification (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Benefits

• Non-corporate work environment among experienced engineers

• Individual growth & development plan supported by cyclical feedback sessions

• Access to knowledge platforms (e.g. Pluralsight)

• Equipment of your choice

• Financing of conferences, external trainings, and certifications

• Language lessons (English, German and Polish for foreigners)

• LuxMed private medical care

• Weekly Lunch & Learn where we meet up in the office, lunch together, and share our knowledge

• Employee referral program

• Rewards for the success of the month and year awarded by our employees

• Special rewards for your years with us (G-Man)

• Integration activities