About the Role
This is a founding-level Staff Engineer opportunity at a Y Combinator–backed AI sales automation startup, where you'll serve as the technical backbone of a small, fast-moving engineering team. You'll own the highest-leverage systems across multiple products — from core infrastructure to AI capabilities — and play a defining role in how the engineering organisation scales. The work is hands-on, high-impact, and deeply cross-functional.
What You'll Do
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Own the most complex, highest-leverage engineering work: core systems, shared frameworks, and critical infrastructure across multiple products.
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Define and evolve architecture decisions that prevent long-term dead-ends as the product portfolio grows.
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Spend the majority of your time writing and shipping production code, leading by example.
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Eliminate technical debt by refactoring abstractions and raising the bar on reliability and engineering standards.
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Mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and direct feedback to improve team output and reduce hidden risk.
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Contribute to the architecture and implementation of AI capabilities, including LLM pipelines and data infrastructure.
What We're Looking For
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8+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of solving genuinely hard technical problems in production.
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Deep full-stack expertise with strong backend, API, and infrastructure skills; comfortable on the frontend when needed (Python, React, TypeScript).
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Proven experience designing and evolving systems across multiple products and teams, including long-term architectural strategy.
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Cloud and DevOps fluency: containerisation (Docker), cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
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Demonstrated ability to improve system performance, reliability, and scalability at scale.
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Experience building or integrating AI systems, LLMs, or large-scale data pipelines is a strong plus.
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A hands-on technical leader who mentors by doing and multiplies team effectiveness.
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Mission-driven, pragmatic, and decisive under uncertainty — comfortable with the intensity and pace of an early-stage startup.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: €80,000 – €130,000 per year. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. In-person presence is expected.