This is a founding Staff Engineer position at a seed-stage AI SaaS startup automating quote and order processing for distributors and manufacturers. You will serve as the technical backbone of a small, fast-moving engineering team, owning high-leverage systems across multiple products and setting the technical standard for the entire organization.
What You’ll Do
Responsibilities
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Own the most complex and highest-leverage engineering work, including core systems, shared frameworks, and critical infrastructure.
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Define and evolve architecture decisions across products to prevent long-term technical dead-ends.
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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 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 ownership of architecture across multiple products or teams, with demonstrated improvements to performance, reliability, and scalability.
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Cloud and DevOps fluency: containerization (Docker), major cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
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Hands-on technical leadership style, mentoring through doing rather than through management alone.
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Experience building or integrating AI systems, LLMs, or large-scale data pipelines is a strong plus.
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Comfortable working in a high-intensity, in-person startup environment.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: 80,000 to 130,000 EUR annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. In-person presence is required.