Founding Engineer – Backend & Platform

<h3>About the Role</h3><p style="min-height:1.5em">We're a seed-stage startup building Germany's most modern accounting and tax advisory platform — an AI-powered operating system for tax advisory firms. We acquire established tax firms and transform them into high-performing, technology-enabled businesses through proprietary software and centralised services.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">As a <strong>Founding Engineer – Backend &amp; Platform</strong>, you'll design and operate the core backend that powers our platform: enabling data flows, reliable workflows, and safe AI applications across dozens of firms. This is foundational, greenfield work — you'll define how data moves, how work gets done, and how we scale. Your code ships to real tax firms from day one.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Visa sponsorship is available for this role.</p><h3>What You'll Do</h3><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Design, implement, and operate core backend services spanning accounting, payroll, reporting, and compliance domains.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Build robust data pipelines to ingest, normalise, and reconcile data from DATEV, banks, and document sources.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Design and operate workflow orchestration for long-running, stateful, and failure-prone processes.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Own correctness, observability, and performance of every system you ship.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Make pragmatic architectural decisions in a true greenfield environment — no legacy constraints to navigate.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Ship to production frequently; your work runs inside live advisory firms from the start.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Collaborate directly with the CTO on system design and core technical decisions.</p></li></ul><h3>What We're Looking For</h3><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Must-haves (dealbreakers):</strong></p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Demonstrated track record of building and operating production backend systems (language-agnostic background welcome; the stack is TypeScript-heavy today).</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">3+ years of experience building backend systems.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Required skills:</strong></p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Strong TypeScript skills.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Solid experience designing systems around data integrity, reliability, and workflows.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Strong observability, monitoring, and performance optimisation skills — metrics, tracing, and logging in production environments.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Hands-on experience integrating DATEV and/or other accounting software into a production platform.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Nice to have:</strong></p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Experience building data pipelines to ingest, normalise, and reconcile data from DATEV, banks, and document sources.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Experience designing and operating workflow orchestration for long-running, stateful, failure-prone processes.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Who thrives here:</strong> Engineers who take full operational ownership, prefer pragmatic solutions over theoretical elegance, and are energised by messy, real-world infrastructure challenges at an early-stage company.</p><h3>Location &amp; Work Arrangement</h3><p style="min-height:1.5em">This is a full-time, on-site role based in <strong>Berlin, Germany</strong>. Visa sponsorship is available.</p><p>Find more <a href="https://www.arbeitnow.com/english-speaking-jobs">English Speaking Jobs in Germany</a> on Arbeitnow</a>