Software Engineer, Data & AI Platform (m/f/x)

<h1>About us</h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">We’re <strong>Cortea</strong>, a Berlin startup <strong>transforming audits with AI</strong>. Manual, document-heavy audits waste expert time while demand keeps rising. Our <strong>AI-powered software and specialized AI agents</strong> remove the repetitive work so auditors can focus on judgment.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Backed by top-tier VCs with &gt;15m funding, with a working product and paying customers, we’re rapidly scaling.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">We value <strong>first-principles thinking, speed, trust, and kindness</strong>. We build side by side <strong>in our Berlin office</strong>.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1>Your Role</h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">We are looking for an <strong>Engineer with strong data engineering and AI systems experience</strong> to build the data, evaluation, and observability foundation for production-grade LLM agents used in complex audit workflows.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">This role sits at the intersection of <strong>backend engineering, data engineering, AI infrastructure, and LLM operations</strong>. You will work hands-on in our backend and agent architecture, building the systems that help us evaluate, monitor, debug, optimize, and continuously improve AI agents in production.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">This is <strong>not</strong> a traditional analytics, BI, or dashboarding role. You should expect to write production code, design infrastructure, work inside backend systems, and directly improve the quality, cost, reliability, and performance of LLM-based agents.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1>What you’ll do</h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">You will help building and operating the technical infrastructure around our AI agents, with a focus on data infrastructure, evaluation, observability, and optimization. Your work will include:</p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Building online and offline evaluation systems for LLM agents, including pipelines that use golden datasets, ground-truth data, human review workflows, and experiment results.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Creating automated quality gates so changes to prompts, context, models, or agent logic can be tested before reaching production.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Analyzing large volumes of agent traces and executions to identify failure modes, quality regressions, latency issues, reliability gaps, and cost optimization opportunities.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Working with columnar data stores and analytical databases such as BigQuery, ClickHouse, or similar technologies.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Building reliable data retention and replay mechanisms for long-term analysis of production agent behaviour.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Creating observability tooling for trace analysis, experiment monitoring, production dashboards, logging, tracing, and debugging.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Working inside our core backend and agent architecture, including building new agents or improving existing agents when needed.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1>Qualifications</h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">You will fit into this role if you:</p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Have strong Python and/or backend engineering experience.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Have strong SQL skills and are comfortable working with large datasets.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Have deployed and operated systems in the cloud, ideally on GCP.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Have practical experience designing data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, event-processing systems, or feedback loops for production data.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Are comfortable working with analytical databases, data warehouses, columnar stores, and high-volume event or trace data.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Understand system design, reliability, observability, monitoring, logging, debugging, and operational trade-offs.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Can work in complex existing systems and quickly build a mental model of how they operate.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Bring senior-level engineering judgment: you can make architectural decisions, communicate trade-offs, and build systems that other engineers can extend.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Are comfortable with ambiguity, able to reason from first principles, and excited to build infrastructure for AI systems that are actively used in production.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em">Nice-to-haves that are a plus:</p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Building infrastructure around LLM-based products or agentic systems, including optimizing LLM usage, context windows, reasoning tokens, or model selection.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Working with production traces from complex distributed systems.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Building internal platforms for engineers, domain experts, or operations teams.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Using workflow orchestration systems such as Temporal or similar.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Familiarity with audit, finance, compliance, or other high-accuracy domains.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Experience in an early-stage startup or fast-moving engineering environment.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>No one checks every box. If you’ve shipped retrieval systems and like owning evaluations and pipelines, let’s talk.</strong></p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1>What we offer</h1><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>High impact &amp; growth:</strong> Shape strategy at a scaling AI startup from day one</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Mission-driven culture:</strong> Ambitious team valuing first-principles thinking and bold ideas</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Attractive compensation:</strong> competitive salary plus significant equity</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Personal development:</strong> Learning budget for courses and conferences</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Startup perks:</strong> Flexible vacation, team lunches, retreats, central Berlin office</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1>Interview process</h1><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>First Call</strong> — Intro to Cortea with our Talent Partner <a target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="decorated-link" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianateodorahurduc/">Adriana</a></p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Second Call</strong> — Technical interview with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jendrik-iben/">Jendrik</a></p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Third Call</strong> — Deep dive into our culture with our Co-Founder <a target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="decorated-link" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipp-hoevelmann/">Philipp</a></p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>On-site Day (Berlin) </strong>— Meet the team and work on a real problem together</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><p style="min-height:1.5em"><em>We’re an equal-opportunity team and encourage women and underrepresented groups to apply.</em></p><div style="text-align:left"><img style="max-width:100%" src="https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/316125b8-3855-479e-a082-a30caf346d45/1ddbeed3-b4e6-4a47-8872-d5cfeee3e842/image.png" /></div><p>Find more <a href="https://www.arbeitnow.com/english-speaking-jobs">English Speaking Jobs in Germany</a> on Arbeitnow</a>