Your Role

Management consulting is an operational business. Every booking, every payroll, every tax return follows a process — and the quality of these processes determines whether a consulting firm can sustain with fifty employees or with five hundred. Most entities in our industry have never systematically questioned these processes. They work because experienced people know workarounds — not because the workflows are well thought out. Vogel is one of the most successful medium-sized consulting firms in Germany — several thousand medium-sized companies entrust us with their tax, commercial, and strategic matters. Established clients, long experience, strong growth base — and at the same time, a setup that moves forward every day.

For two to five years, you have been building workflows and automations for internal operators — in a workflow consultancy, an automation agency, as an Internal Platform Engineer in a scale-up, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer (internal). You have launched at least five productive workflows that save hours per day today — measured, documented, owned. You are hands-on familiar with n8n, Make, or Claude Code, Python or JavaScript at a scripting level are part of your toolkit, and you have integrated at least one LLM API into production. You are moving on because the phase of building workflows for a tech product has become too narrow for you — you now want to apply the same leverage in an industry where every hour of automation directly benefits clients. At Vogel, you report directly to management — Joachim and Moritz Vogel as visible individuals, with named responsibility — because the operations layer is being rebuilt here. Structures that sustain — established clients, long experience, strong growth base — and at the same time, a setup that moves forward every day. No corporate corset. No groundless greenfield.

You are a hands-on builder with responsibility for building: approximately 80 to 90 percent of your time you will be building yourself — workflows, integrations, small internal tools for Vogel operators (tax advisors, tax clerks, payroll accountants, and in the future, consultants in Finance and Advisory). The remaining 10 to 20 percent you will be building the team: two to three Associates Automation & AI, who will deliver with you. You do not speak directly with clients — your users are internal. You will take over the operational excellence of the core business from day one, in accounting, payroll, and advisory. The natural development will lead to a Senior Manager Automation & AI role (management career) within twenty-four to thirty-six months, with ownership of process standards, automation, and operational integration across all locations.

Your Responsibility

Build and maintain workflows in production

• Identify the operational bottlenecks in Vogel's core processes (accounting, payroll, advisory) across all locations. Where does one person wait for another, where does someone enter data twice, where does the process break under stress?

• Build the workflows yourself in n8n, Make, or Claude Code that remove these bottlenecks. Your benchmark: running productively with error handling, retry logic, and monitoring, not concepts in a slide deck.

• Establish production discipline from day one: test client before live client, versioned workflows, documented contracts against DATEV, Personio, and Vogel's internal systems. By the seventh workflow, nothing should break silently.

Team Building

• Hire two to three Associates Automation & AI yourself and work hand-in-hand with them. You will be responsible for screening, interviews, and conviction recommendations — power user profiles with builder experience, not pure business administrators with an interest in digitalization.

• You will assume disciplinary responsibility for your Associates in coordination with management — performance reviews, escalation decisions, hiring support.

• Establish the operational routines — weekly rhythm, workflow documentation standards, tool conventions — that will later be rolled out to all locations.

Tool Architecture and Acquisition Integration

• Decide the tool stack for the core operational business — n8n vs. Make, custom code components, DATEV interfaces, own integration layer. You will also work with external service providers in the tech sector.

• Develop integration playbooks for the operational onboarding of acquired entities in future acquisitions. Every acquisition is a stress test for your workflows — new locations will work according to Vogel's patterns within weeks.

• Coordinate with Corporate Development to ensure that the operational synergies defined in the business case for each acquisition are actually realized.

Your Perspectives

What you will have delivered after 6 months:

• You have mapped the ten biggest operational bottlenecks in accounting, payroll, and advisory. Three of them have already been resolved by productive workflows — with error handling, monitoring, and client benefit.

• You have hired the first Associate Automation & AI — screening, interview, conviction recommendation, onboarding.

• You have made an initial tool stack architecture decision (n8n vs. Make, DATEV integration layer, LLM API setup) and documented it in writing.

What you will have delivered after 12 months:

• You have built your operations layer with two to three Associates. You lead them technically and disciplinarily in coordination with management, and have gone through your own quarterly feedback sessions.

• You have at least ten running workflows with measurable time savings per client relationship — visible in the quarterly reports.

• You have gone through the integration playbook for at least one acquisition — operational onboarding of new clients, tool migration, workflow adaptation.

What you will have delivered after 24 months:

• Your operations layer demonstrably supports growth — client numbers and complexity have increased, the personnel curve is flatter. Concrete impact in corporate reporting is provable.

• You are the escalation point for standard operational cases and architecture decisions across all locations. The workflows from your department serve as the template for other locations.

• You are a candidate for Senior Manager Automation & AI — through an independently built operations layer and demonstrable economies of scale, not just years of service.

Where the position is developing:

The next step is Senior Manager Automation & AI (management career) — however, this requires an independently built operations layer and demonstrable economies of scale, not just additional years of service. Beyond the Senior Manager level, the Director and, prospectively, VP path opens up along our career framework.

What you bring

Experience & Track Record

• You have two to five years of full-time, hands-on workflow and automation building — in a workflow consultancy or automation agency, at a B2B scale-up as an Internal Platform Engineer or Internal Tools Lead, as a Forward Deployed Engineer (internal), or as a Senior RevOps with a demonstrable own tool track record.

• You have launched at least five productive workflows that save hours per day today. Proof: Loom walkthrough or concrete implementation references in your CV.

• You have previously guided a team of two to three junior builders technically — workflow review and coaching is sufficient; formal people management is not a prerequisite.

• Profiles that do not fit the above criteria but bring substantial workflow/automation depth are explicitly invited — we evaluate based on contribution, not labels. The advertised range calibrates to the primary profile. Those with a different background will start at a different market price and converge to the role level after twelve months of proven performance — the logic behind this is in our compensation principles.

Skills & Work Approach

• Tool Fluency: hands-on in at least two of n8n, Make, Zapier, Claude Code, plus Python or JavaScript at a scripting level for API calls and data transformations, solid SQL, reading and writing REST APIs.

• LLM Integration: at least one LLM API (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral) integrated into production — with prompt hygiene, retry logic, cost awareness.

• You use AI as a natural tool — for process analysis, drafting, code generation, pattern recognition in operational data. Repetitive tasks are a challenge for automation to you, not a destiny.

• You break down processes intuitively: Where are the three dumb steps, which two can be collapsed, what remains? This is a way of thinking, not a learned skill.

• You can quickly familiarize yourself with operational domains that are new to you — tax advisory, payroll, DATEV. You don't have to know them, but you will grasp the process logic within a few weeks.

• You communicate in a way that long-term Vogel operators trust you — you change the work habits of people who have been doing their job for twenty years without offending or overwhelming them.

Mindset & Personality

• You have the ambition to set the highest standard in everything you deliver — not because someone is checking, but because mediocrity personally bothers you.

• You have a builder identity, not a consultant identity — you measure yourself by the running workflow, not by the concept slide. Anyone who shows a PowerPoint in the interview as proof instead of a Loom with a working tool is sitting at the wrong table.

• You are comfortable with ambiguity — you get "accounting is slow, make it faster" and don't need a project brief.

• You have the humility to learn from practitioners. The tax advisor with twenty years of experience knows things about their process that are not in any diagram.

• Vogel is hierarchical in decision-making, flat in communication, autonomous in execution. Performance is celebrated, not hidden — those who want to advance because they are good will find the space here, without political camouflage and without consensus theater.

What you won't find with us

• No strategy consulting role in disguise. If your last job was MBB and you write PowerPoints that others are supposed to implement, this is the wrong table. We build, we don't delegate.

• No client contact. Your users are internal (tax advisors, tax clerks, payroll accountants). Clients speak with the domain professionals, not with Automation & AI.

• No greenfield platform building in an empty room. Vogel has over a hundred employees, established clients, DATEV is running. What you build must function alongside ongoing operations — not in a sandbox.

• No partner company with competing vested interests. We are one company with a one-firm logic — one brand, one culture, one hiring bar. No management-by-committee, no consensus for its own sake.

• No exit from building into a purely managerial role. You build yourself — with 80 to 90 percent of your time. Those seeking a pure people management career are looking for a different position.

FAQ

1. What is Vogel — and where do you work?

Vogel is one of Germany's leading medium-sized consultancies — a family business since 1959, from Aalen — and is building the leading consulting platform for the mid-market from it. We are growing at several locations: in Aalen/Ostwürttemberg as the established headquarters and in Munich as a new hub. At both, we are looking for people across all functions — from tax advisory to consulting to the strategic teams building the platform.

2. How should the salary bands be understood?

Deliberately broad — and stated at every point. We differentiate based on track record and market value, not on degree: scarce, highly sought-after profiles at the upper end, less scarce ones at the lower end. We calibrate exclusively to the market — two people with similar experience can earn differently with us.

3. How much — and how — do you work at Vogel?

We measure by what you achieve, not by hours. However, it's also true: if you're looking for 9-to-5, you're not our first choice. We are looking for people who work intensely out of their own drive because the tasks are worthwhile. How you distribute your time is largely up to you. What we share: We work together in person — culture, sparring, and the best ideas emerge from daily proximity. We are not a remote company and do not have extensive home office policies; individual remote days are not a problem.

4. What is the application process like?

Lean, fast, transparent — and tiered by profile. For entry-level roles (internships, working student positions, career entry), two interviews and a short work sample are usually sufficient; experienced roles are a bit more extensive. For selected senior roles, we are testing the introduction of a joint work day in the future, so that both sides can get to know each other better. Always applicable: scheduled appointments, quick decision, substantial feedback — regardless of the outcome.

5. How does variable compensation work?

Tied to performance quarterly, qualitatively assessed. The scale increases with the level: up to 20% Associate, 27.5% Manager, 35% Senior Manager, 42.5% Director, 50% VP. The expected value with good performance — you meet the requirements, set your own accents, pass the keeper test — is around 50% of the maximum; the maximum bonus is not the norm. The focus is on a holistic assessment by your manager: ownership, quality, learning curve, collaboration, impact.

6. How do I develop — what career paths are there?

Two active paths: Mastery (technical depth, expert career) and Pioneer (leadership, management). You choose the direction after onboarding, usually in years 1-3. Career entry is not a special path, but the early part of the same journey — from working student or intern to Associate, for the best without a new application process.

7. Team, culture, vacation?

A communal lunch is an open daily offer — not mandatory; whoever wants to join can, everyone can eat at any time. In addition, dinners, social events, and offsites at regular intervals — not as a mandatory program, but because a good team also shares time outside of work. Benefits: thoughtful and substantial, not symbolic. Vacation: 28 days.

8. I know someone — is there a referral bonus?

Yes — €2,500 for every successfully filled position (no internships). A brief context is enough: who you are thinking of, for which role, why. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it should be substantial.

Compensation: €114,750 – €146,625 • Fixed: €90k - €115k · Bonus: €24.75k - €31.625k · EV: €105.3k - €134.55k

• • OTE €114,750 – €146,625 • Fixed: €90k - €115k · Bonus: €24.75k - €31.625k · EV: €105.3k - €134.55k

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