Qualifications You will fit into this role if you:

• Have strong Python and/or backend engineering experience.
• Have strong SQL skills and are comfortable working with large datasets.
• Have deployed and operated systems in the cloud, ideally on GCP.
• Have practical experience designing data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, event-processing systems, or feedback loops for production data.
• Are comfortable working with analytical databases, data warehouses, columnar stores, and high-volume event or trace data.
• Understand system design, reliability, observability, monitoring, logging, debugging, and operational trade-offs.
• Can work in complex existing systems and quickly build a mental model of how they operate.
• Bring senior-level engineering judgment: you can make architectural decisions, communicate trade-offs, and build systems that other engineers can extend.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity, able to reason from first principles, and excited to build infrastructure for AI systems that are actively used in production.

Nice-to-haves that are a plus:

• Building infrastructure around LLM-based products or agentic systems, including optimizing LLM usage, context windows, reasoning tokens, or model selection.
• Working with production traces from complex distributed systems.
• Building internal platforms for engineers, domain experts, or operations teams.
• Using workflow orchestration systems such as Temporal or similar.
• Familiarity with audit, finance, compliance, or other high-accuracy domains.
• Experience in an early-stage startup or fast-moving engineering environment.

No one checks every box. If you’ve shipped retrieval systems and like owning evaluations and pipelines, let’s talk.

What we offer

• High impact & growth: Shape strategy at a scaling AI startup from day one
• Mission-driven culture: Ambitious team valuing first-principles thinking and bold ideas
• Attractive compensation: competitive salary plus significant equity
• Personal development: Learning budget for courses and conferences
• Startup perks: Flexible vacation, team lunches, retreats, central Berlin office

Interview process

• First Call — Intro to Cortea with our Talent Partner Adriana
• Second Call — Technical interview with Jendrik
• Third Call — Deep dive into our culture with our Co-Founder Philipp
• On-site Day (Berlin) — Meet the team and work on a real problem together