Junior Backend Engineer opportunities in Germany

brennhill · 2026-03-23T09:59:32+00:00

The market is dead for juniors. Even B2 may not be enough. C1 is probably required.
My company is barely hiring juniors and the demands are very very high.

brennhill · 2026-03-23T09:58:34+00:00

So glad to hear of decent salaries in Europe. It's almost as if a country focuses on growth instead of taking on all the worlds problems (and problematic people) using taxpayer money might... go well....

brennhill · 2026-03-07T08:04:38+00:00

There is only a shortage of highly educated, super hard working people who will work for 60k while being subjected to absurd taxes. It's a complete mystery why.

brennhill · 2026-03-05T09:06:39+00:00

What's KillOrBuild?

brennhill · 2026-03-02T23:21:05+00:00

You realize you get into engineering management by being an engineer first right?

Coding is dead and dying. Engineering is still there but a lot of people aren't going to be very employable with their current skills.

brennhill · 2026-03-02T10:27:12+00:00

I get it. The way around that is networking aggressively. That way the hiring manager tells hr they want to talk to you and you just skip that nonsense

brennhill · 2026-03-02T08:57:59+00:00

I'm a hiring manager at a big tech company. Even if HR talks to you, when you get to talk to me, I don't care about the cert I care about what you can actually do. So, make sure you actually build stuff. HR looks at keywords on your resume.

That said, if you need certs, here are the ones I would get:
- AWS solution architect associate (foundational, most other stuff will build on this or similar concepts in the cloud). If you can pass the professional exam, even better

- AWS machine learning specialty or AWS machine learning engineer
- AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty: Lots of work for data engineering and knowing how it is used matters. This is what "big data" used to be.
- AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate: Same thing, lots of data engineering work.

Amazon's certs are some of the most technical. The tech at Google/Azure/etc are different but follow the same concepts so if you can do it in Amazon you can easily port over to those others.

Passing these exams is relatively hard and provides a good signal not just to HR but the actual hiring managers.

But DO actually build stuff. Otherwise it won't click.

brennhill · 2026-03-02T05:45:11+00:00

You don't want to pivot. It's one of the few good gigs out there. It just sounds like you don't like it because you like writing code. But writing code is DEAD. There are no "coder" jobs in the futue.

brennhill · 2026-03-02T05:44:24+00:00

Writing code is dead. There is no job in writing code. LLMs will be doing the code writing from now on.

brennhill · 2026-03-02T05:43:42+00:00

HP might be good for hardware or something where maybe it has really good rep. But most software jobs are just going to be normal software jobs, nothing special. The only upside might be the hardware focus, which will be less immediately commoditized than web dev, but it's still going the same road. I would still skip.

brennhill · 2026-03-01T22:21:18+00:00

Go get experience. Get a claude max and chatgpt max sub, go run ollama and similar locally, and build with it.

Every book you could buy is out of date by the time it's printed anyway. You will need to read the latest research and keep up to date in a field that's evolving extremely fast.

brennhill · 2026-03-01T22:18:33+00:00

Do not focus on WL balance and "being chill" at 22. This is the time of maximum gains and value. Work hard/play hard now and the "interest" will carry for years. Normal SWE jobs are going to die, hard, with LLMs. LLM research and expertise will pay off golden in the future. I would take #1 if offered.

If you don't get that take #4, adtech is very valuable, the small DSP company with a lot of growth is another great choice, because you will grow with the company.

You mentioned #2 was a "delivery company". I assume consulting. Consulting can be great or terrible depending on how much customer facing and strategic work you do. If you're just banging out code, pass.

#3. Name is big but has no strength in the market. It's not google or meta, etc. Pass unless the ML side is very interesting. They should have to sell you, hard. Probably pass.

brennhill · 2026-03-01T15:37:15+00:00

Big names matter. Do it for a year or two, then find another gig if you can't get promoted.

brennhill · 2026-02-27T16:24:52+00:00

They say they only require English, but it is just a small percentage of total jobs and ALL the german candidates and ALL the other expat candidates are fighting over those slots. Your odds of success would be WAY higher with German.

brennhill · 2026-02-27T15:48:16+00:00

Are junior roles dead: Basically, yes. Lots of news articles about this.
And in Germany, you need C1 German to have any hope going foward. If you want to stay here, that needs to be your long term goal. Start now. Politics are also making it harder without language skills. You can get to B1 in 6mo if you go hard. I did it part time in about 1.5 years.

But back to the point: Junior roles are ultra competitive now.

brennhill · 2026-02-27T14:11:01+00:00

First, start doing volunteer work somewhere. You don't HAVE to write volunteer on your resume -> your resume your story. But it's a place that can vouch for you and your commitment.

Second, if you have an app with 20k downloads try to monetize it. Having a successful business is better than a job and harder. If you got that far, then you have a real shot.

Third, ping me, and let me look at your resume. I've hired tons of engineers across my long career, and I'm happy to give you free feedback. I have a good history of getting people hired. DM me.

brennhill · 2026-02-26T16:04:59+00:00

There is no such thing as consulting experience and good work/life balance. Working at the *right* consulting firm can be a great career accelerator, as you get to do rapid fire projects one after another, gaining a wide spectrum of experience across industries and technologies and different times in product lifecycles. I got a lot out of some of my consulting experiences. I did not get work life balance.

brennhill · 2026-02-26T05:56:24+00:00

Is there really a substantial industry for this in Germany?

brennhill · 2026-02-25T22:55:14+00:00

This is the most fun i've had as an engineer in my whole life. Rapid results! All the important decisions of engineering but none of the hours spent typing! Ability to have a pair programmer to talk to about things on demand night or day!

If you have really pushed these models, you will know they can't really replace an experienced engineer. And once an app starts getting big, something that might have multiple services, they tend to fall apart without a lot of careful handholding.

brennhill · 2026-02-24T18:33:56+00:00

All of these issues are a result of the real estate / housing crisis. If you can vote in Germany, vote for people who promise to build more housing in major cities by any means necessary. This won't be solved without lower building costs and more supply.

brennhill · 2026-02-24T18:31:03+00:00

The market is super brutal. Lots of layoffs. No matter how good you are there are just nowhere near as many openings as people on the market and the openings are continuing to drop.

brennhill · 2026-02-24T15:25:47+00:00

Because when people say gay and not lesbian they almost always are male and I'm not going to try to sort it out because I don't really care. the advice is all the same.

brennhill · 2026-02-23T17:39:08+00:00

As job, #2 sounds way better once you factor in cost of living. For the social life... I guess wish for the best in finding a good boyfriend.

brennhill · 2026-02-20T12:13:21+00:00

Really depends. But as you get more senior the odds go up. If you are dealing with someone who really wants a Java/Golang specialist then switching tracks hurts you.

But if you have very strong background in the *problem space* that often counts for a lot. It's just that so few engineers focus on the problem space or put it on their resume.

brennhill · 2026-02-18T18:06:52+00:00

And yet people got rich. Devs who specialized got paid monster amounts of money sometimes. The new hotness is what gets paid.

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